Abstract:
Environmental factors affecting
shared spaces are typically designed to appeal to the
broadest potential audiences they will serve, while
ignoring the preferences of the actual inhabitants found
in the environment at any given time. Examples of such
factors include the lighting, temperature and décor in the
common areas of an office building. MUSICFX is a group
preference arbitration system that allows the members of a
fitness center to influence, but not directly control, one
of these shared factors: the selection of music in the
fitness center. The system includes a database of member
preferences, a badge reader to track who is in the fitness
center, and a group preference arbitration algorithm that
sorts the 91 genres of music (available via satellite)
according to the preferences of the current group of
members. MUSICFX has been in daily operation at the
fitness center in the Chicago office of Accenture since
November 1997, and currently has over 800 members enrolled
in the system. This video illustrates the impact of
MUSICFX in a series of vignettes and describes how the
system allocates influence among the inhabitants of the
fitness center environment. Further details on the system
can be found in our CSCW '98 paper.
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