Christoffer Dahl's profile

Dilemmabox - Tactile Twitter Test

The Dilemmabox
A tactile approach to voting on Twitter
What?
Remember when interacting was more than touching a screen? How you always have wanted to pull one of those big ropes to ring a doorbell? Are there times when a total stranger might answer your question better than your biased friends?

Introducing the DilemmaBox, a physical and fun approach to your everyday dilemmas! Acting as a communication portal, a medium for your personal inquiries, passersby can easily take stand simply
by pulling a rope.

The Dilemmabox has it's own twitter account where it continuously looks for dilemmas other users post. When it finds one, the dilemma is added to a database that is used for handling the votes. After two hours or twenty answers to one dilemma, it tweets back the results to the original sender.

My role
I did everything from concept to execution!
As an experiment in rapid prototyping and limited accessibility to tools and material, this build is by no way the prettiest you might have seen, but I hope it can provide you with some interesting insights to the process.
Then you write the code necessary. To get the tweets addressed to @DilemmaBox, I use a combination of PHP and the cURL module, plus the Twitter search API. The tweets are filtered so just the question-tweets are passed on to a mysql-database where they are stored. This "engine" is running on a dedicated machine separate of the box itself, to insure stability and continuous reading and replying of the tweets.

For the visual and interactive part of the project, I use ajax/json to fetch data from the mysql-server. The information is then displayed on a website where I simply use the jkey-library to attach functions to the key press inside the box; a function that writes back to the mysql-table. And hey presto; you got yourself a vote counting machine, you understand the rest. Code is available upon request
Dilemmabox - Tactile Twitter Test
Published:

Dilemmabox - Tactile Twitter Test

Introducing the DilemmaBox, a physical and fun approach to your everyday dilemmas! Acting as a communication portal, a medium for your personal i Read More

Published: