First Sketch

In this meeting, we formalized our pre-plan.

We decided that we are building a location-based survey kiosk, where people who pass on the street can vote on issues the city wants to pose.

Our example is Dizingoff Square.  In 2012, Tel Aviv municipality asked its citizens whether they believe they should make the place into underground parking or just renovate the current structure.

The following are preliminary builds, from the front, back and sides.

The front of the kiosk.  The voting will be done using one's feet, in connotation to standing up for one's beliefs and one's voice carries weight.

Behind the kiosk will be a projector, that will project the information onto a screen. 

The relative location of the projector in relation to the rest of the stand.

Features

After we decided on our new direction, we got together to decide what the main features are going to be in our product.  From the psychological study, we decided that the product should have the following features:

Give information about the issue - This information will be presented using a short, informative video.  It is important to us that the citizens be able to voice their decisions after reaching an informed decision rather than out of the blue.

Give the ability to vote in the issue - The voting will be done using a pedal-like device, so that one steps on their decisions.  The voter can vote either for or against.  Stepping down on the pedal will take a picture of the bottom of a voter's foot as authentication, so that no two of the same shoes can be used in the span of a minute.
The pedal comes from our need to manifest physically the metaphor we are using: put your weight behind your decision.

Display real-time results - Visually display the distribution of the results by using a bar graph.  It is important to us that the citizens see the results of the current vote because of the psychological studies we have read.

Display the results in front of city hall - A colossal, constantly-changing display of the results will be built in front of city hall.  The display will be built like two large test tubes, one filling up with red water, the other with green.  As soon as someone votes in the kiosk, the display will be updated, and the water level will change accordingly so that the results can be seen from far away.

Psychological Need

To make sure our product was really needed, we looked for psychological aspects that would increase the reason for making a physical stand rather than just an application.  We found some interesting papers.

Subtle environmental cues and voting

• Stimuli in the environment have been shown to prime or activate content in memory, making related constructs more accessible, and doing so even outside conscious awareness (Bargh, 2006). Based on this fact, researchers found that subtle environmental cues can have a significant influence on consequential real-world decisions. Specifically, the type of polling location (e.g., church, school, etc.) people happen to be assigned to vote in a U.S. general election influences how they cast their ballots (Berger, Meredith & Wheeler, 2008).

Social environment and voting

• Voting is widely regarded as a citizen’s duty (Blais 2000), and citizens worry that others will think less of them if they fail to participate in elections. Voters’ sense of civic duty has long been a leading explanation of voter turnout among both behavioral (Campbell, Gurin, and Miller 1954) and formal (Downs 1957; Riker and Ordeshook 1968) theories of voter turnout.
• Communication can drastically increase within-group cooperation (thus, voting) (Schram & Sonnemans, 1996).
• Many social scientists are aware that social embeddedness matters for behavior in public settings in general, and for voter participation in particular. Kenny (1992) for example, stresses the important influence of a voter’s immediate social environment on the decision to vote. One important element of the environmentis information about others’ behavior.

Links for the papers:

• • Social Pressure and Voter Turnout

• • Where people vote affects how they vote

•           Why people vote: Experimental evidence
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Change of Direction

We have started realizing that having people ask whatever they want on the street would end up being very tiring after a short time, so we went in a different direction.

Since most of our group lives in the largest city in Israel, we know how it feels when the city decides on some stupid resolution that affects everyone, but no one know it's going on.

We want to give citizens a way to get involved in municipal decisions.

First Ideas

Our idea started with the idea of crowd wisdom.

Crowd wisdom comes from this fact: if someone asks one person how much a given cow weighs, it's a shot in the dark, but if someone asks one thousand people how much the same cow weighs, the average of those votes will give you the exact weight of the cow.

Freaky, isn't it.

So we wanted to put a stand in the middle of the city, where a person could "shout" their question and have people answer, and the person could go away that the highest response (or the average of those responses) gives them a good idea of what to purchase or where to go for vacation, for example.