VoiceYourView: Collecting real-time feedback on the design of public spaces

This paper reports on VoiceYourView, a kind of intelligent kiosk, which uses speech recognition and natural language processing to gather the public's creative input on the public space designs. Over a six week period, VoiceYourView was deployed in a public space and 2000 design critiques were collected from 600 people. The paper shows that people are capable of providing creative input on their environment using unstructured speech or text and that a good proportion of these comments are actionable. The paper also investigates the use of public displays to auto-summarize comments left by the public so far. Although there is anecdotal evidence that this encourages participation, an experiment found that filtering comments (e.g., to display only positive responses) had no effect on what people had to say.