Voting for Comfort

It struck me riding the shuttle to work yesterday that it was extremely cold and the only thing I could have done to fix it would have been awkwardly walking to the front of the bus and asking the bus driver to change the temp (which by the air usually needs to be turned right back on because of how stuffy it gets). Maybe that is easy for some people, but me I would worry that maybe I'm just feeling cold and actually the shuttle is a fine temperature.

What I'm suggesting is for in any multi-passenger vehicle a voting system for things like temperature (I haven't thought of other applications, but I'm sure there would be plenty of others). Maybe even a simple 'too hot' and 'too cold' button. And everyone on the bus or plane or shuttle could either press or not press those buttons. And the temp control could do some fancy aggregation with the information and automatically adjust to a median temperature. If the system was fancy enough you could even create regional temperatures for the vehicle based on the apparent trends.

The idea is something like if 6 people are too hot, it is probably time to get the air turned on even if one person is freezing. Unfortunately they persons temperature is probably an anomaly and they should probably invest in a coat if that sort of thing happens to them a lot. It would sort of create a group reality principle for the vehicle (buildings too maybe?). So if everyone is crazy and think that it is too cold, then it is too cold...for them at least. And as such the temp changes.

Yay.