VoxBox: a Tangible Machine that Gathers Opinions from the Public at Events

 Basically the Voxbox is designed as a tangible system to gather people’s opinions in interactive way through roughly 4 steps like questions, completion, answers and results.

     As we all know traditionally we always use the surveys to research people’ reaction, but since it has the limitation of approaching people,so in this way the voxbox which is made of both physical input and output devices tried to solve this problem which can invite people to use it in positive way. 

     Regarding to the background, the voxbox which include the use of large screens, mobile phones and voting box elicit opinions with clear and easy-understandable affordances. Meanwhile the researchers also focus on attracting public attention to let people approach the Voxbox through designing the voxbox as interesting and playful as possible.

     The voxbox is intended to stand out as modular system, at first, grouping similar questions mainly is about the questionnaire with a logical flow of questions. And then, after arranging the questions, we should encourage completion and show progress, the voxbox is visible for people to check the completion, the progress is also shown by lighting panels one by one. The next step is to gather answers to closed and open questions, they try to use the phone handset to give the answers willingly. Finally, the voxbox which make difference from the traditional methods to gather people’s opinion is  that people can see the collected results.

     According to the design and implemention od voxbox, it is mentioned that the voxbox was inspired by the archaic computer game” the incredible machine.” In details the questions group was divided into 5 types such as demographics, mood, the crowd, the event and open questions, so I think the difficult part is to match the different questions with different physical mechanisms. Since the voxbox inside is kind of complicated, which need the implementation to test it can work well or not. Voxbox was controlled by open source Arduino technologies. Moreover, voxbox was designed to not only allow people to share data on their demographics and views, but to also give them the opportunity to learn more about the opinions held by others.As for the initial deployment, the voxbox is concerned to connect the relationship between the government, digital democracy and the public. And from the article we can know that Voxbox was really well-welcomed. it is written that most users answered the open questions through the phone, and answer the questions in positive way. To some extent, this kind of way to gather public opinion is very effective, which just let them approach it by themselves rather than invite them.

      Since when I see how popular the Voxbox is, I will say it is really a successful work to attract public attention which take effective function on the gathering public opinions, but I think nowadays people use internet more that the product itself, so I just guess even the voxbox seems effective to let people approach it, but the people can know or use it, it’s a big problem.