This research proposes MeeGram, an original visual identity system that captures the affective dimension of an individual and compensates for the limitations of digitized—encoded in numbers—IDs, such as barcodes. In an industrialized society, digitized IDs are widely used to identify objects and persons, and IDs are typically designed as certain compositions of computer-generated letters and numbers to make it easy to standardize, anonymize, encode, and decode. Identification of merchandise and personnel using barcode, one type of digital ID, is essential to all aspects of commerce as it facilitates speedy and accurate transactions.
However, the downside of such convenience is the limited capacity of digitized IDs in communicating concepts that cannot be expressed in numbers, such as emotions that all human beings are born with. Recently, there have been a few interesting attempts to create digitized personal/corporate identity systems that also embrace and incorporate the affective dimension of the person/business in visual elements, such as colors and symbols. For example, D-Barcode is an attempt to create customized barcodes by adding images to regular barcodes to turn them into something more fun and memorable (figure1). Also, Color Code (figure 4) is a system that generates customized 5 x 5 matrices painted in four colors (black, blue, green, red). Color Code represents the characteristics of individuals and organizations and is decoded with a cell-phone reader app.
Motivated by the idea, the researcher proposes a visual ID system that shows a slice of its owner’s personality. The proposed system, MeeGram, represents the owner’s personality in five dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (the five broad domains in the Five Factor Model), and each dimension is visualized as a unique symbol. When the five symbols are layered on top of each other, the resulting symbol—which is more than the simple sum of five symbols, considering the interactions between individual symbols—provides the owner with a unique, personalized representation of his/her identity.
The MeeGram is developed based on the data collected from research participants with a qualitative research approach.

The researcher recruited two groups of participants—graphic designers and non-graphic designers—for this study. First, the participants were asked to collect images that were somehow related to their identities for four weeks. At the end the fourth week, the researcher conducted interviews with the images, analyzed their comments with Affinity Diagrams, and created each person’s profile in the Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism dimensions. The profiles were translated into visual symbols, which will function as their IDs. The researcher presented the symbols to the participants and collected their feedback. When presented with the symbols, the non-graphic designer group had a hard time understanding what their symbols meant, whereas the graphic designer group was relatively faster in interpreting the symbols. Most participants in both groups, however, agreed that their personal symbols reflected their personality traits to some degree.
Throughout the research and implementation process, the researcher found limitations of MeeGram IDs due to the concept is intangible, broad, and vaguely defined. In addition, the number of participants is small in this research so the findings are rather directive than conclusive. The limitations point to the direction of future studies. Firstly, MeeGram will be developed into an online system, a website, or a social network site application where people already have networks of friends and share images with them. Secondly, the researcher would like to explore other personality models beyond the Five Factor Model and develop another visual ID system.