July 2018 archive · Published July 6, 2026 · 7 min read
Yellow Blue Bus: An Emotional Translation Experiment at LOVEHACK Minsk
A personal archive note on continuing Yellow Blue Bus at LOVEHACK in Minsk in July 2018 after the idea first emerged and was prototyped at Garage48 Visual Hackathon 2018.
Origin
Garage48 Visual Hackathon 2018
Continuation
LOVEHACK, Minsk
Date
July 2018
Project
Yellow Blue Bus
In Minsk in July 2018, I returned to a hackathon idea about one of the oldest and least solvable human problems: how to make another person understand what we feel.
Yellow Blue Bus had started earlier that summer at Garage48 Visual Hackathon 2018, where we built the first version as a visual and emotional translation prototype. LOVEHACK gave the same idea a second room, this time surrounded by people carrying early ideas about dating, relationships, communication, and intimacy.
The format was familiar: form a team, choose a problem, build quickly, and present before the temporary world of the hackathon dissolved. The subject made the room less ordinary. Love is full of interfaces, but most of them are informal, unstable, and difficult to debug.
The name sounded playful, almost like a children's phrase, but it held the premise of the project inside it. Spoken aloud, the English words echo the Russian phrase "Я люблю вас" (ya lyublyu vas), meaning "I love you" in a formal or plural form. A sentence could cross a language boundary through sound before its literal meaning was understood.
The idea inside the name
Language can fail while feeling still gets through
Yellow Blue Bus began with a phonetic accident that generations of language learners have noticed: unfamiliar sounds can hide familiar intentions. The phrase is memorable because it turns translation into a small performance. You say three ordinary English words and briefly hear another language looking back at you.
That joke exposed a more serious design question. People do not communicate emotion through vocabulary alone. Meaning also travels through rhythm, volume, hesitation, facial expression, timing, cultural convention, and the history between two people. A dictionary can translate the sentence and still lose the message.
Our concept explored whether a digital tool could carry some of that missing layer. The public account of the event described Yellow Blue Bus as combining voice analysis with short videos to help people communicate emotion across language barriers. The prototype was early, but the ambition was clear: support the emotional passage between people rather than merely replacing one set of words with another.
What we were really prototyping
An emotional interface, not a better phrasebook
Looking back, the most interesting part of Yellow Blue Bus was not the specific technology. Voice analysis in 2018 carried obvious limitations, and emotion is too contextual to be reduced safely to a neat label. The useful part was the shift in what the interface was asked to do. It was being asked to preserve ambiguity while offering another person a way into it.
Emotional products often become overconfident. They announce that a person is happy, angry, attracted, compatible, or at risk, as though an algorithm has discovered an objective fact. A more responsible interface would treat its interpretation as a prompt for conversation. It might say that a voice sounds tense, that confidence is low, or that several readings are possible. It would help people ask better questions rather than declaring what another person feels.
The short-video component pointed toward another truth. Sometimes emotion needs an example, gesture, face, scene, or cultural reference. Communication becomes richer when people can choose a representation that feels closer to their intention than a translated sentence does. The interface becomes a bridge made of several imperfect signals instead of a machine pretending to know the heart.
The hackathon as a temporary institution
A weekend can reveal a question that survives the prototype
Hackathons reward visible progress, and that pressure can make every project sound more complete than it is. The durable value of the format lies elsewhere. It creates a temporary institution in which strangers are allowed to take an unfinished question seriously. For a brief period, the question receives a team, a name, a screen, a pitch, and enough shared attention to become real.
Yellow Blue Bus did not need to become a company to matter. It gave form to a problem I would continue meeting in international work: translation is never only linguistic, culture is part of the interface, and trust depends on what a system refuses to simplify. Those lessons later became central to how I think about localization, accessibility, AI, and products designed between markets.
Looking back from HAAM
The project belongs to a longer history of designing between languages
HAAM's work now often sits in the distance between what a system says and what a person understands. That distance appears in localization, consent, AI explanations, accessibility, cultural references, tone, and the invisible rules that determine whether someone feels addressed or merely processed.
Yellow Blue Bus was an early, compact version of that concern. Its name carried two languages at once. Its concept treated emotion as information that could be supported but not fully captured. Its strongest idea was also its simplest: understanding another person requires more than converting words. It requires an interface humble enough to leave room for the person on the other side.