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
Discuss This Project: ( Comments)