Whether it is voting for president or deciding from where the office should order lunch, group decision-making leaves people with varying degrees of satisfaction with the decision. One of the difficulties in current voting mechanisms is the inability to express complexities of opinions. This project works to introduce new voting mechanisms and systems which strive to align our intensions and desires with our behavior and collective decisions.

Current Voting Projects

1. Want to see what I'm reading? Here's a reading list covering some history of voting research and voting technology.
   
   
2. Collective Light
   As an experiment on the impact of time and location on your opinion, Collective Light is an interface for controlling the color lights in the Media Lab's Garden (E15-344). You can vote for the type of light you prefer in your work environment, ranging from a warm red to a cool blue. The system averages the individual votes (or preferences) along the warmth scale to determine the color of the lights, allowing for group collaborative control.
   
   
3. The $10 Election
   In the spring of 2002, MIT's undergraduate community held an election for the position of Undergraduate Association President. During the election, a write-in candidate emerged, offering to any student who voted for him. How did this change the election results? What was the emotional reaction of the voting community? Did voter participation increase? We ran a survey during the election asking these sorts of questions, to see how attitudes and behavior are affected by the introduction of money into the election process. View an informal presentation on the survey results.
   
   
4. Digital Life Dinner Elections
   

Presentations

eRationality & Voting, eMarkets Annual Meeting, Mastercard International, Purchase, NY, Dec 10, 2001.

Mobile Ad-Hoc Voting, CHI 2002 Workshop on Mobile Ad-Hoc Collaboration, Minneapolis, MN, 22 April 2002.