Happy Or Not

Smiley terminals are a common sight in public and private spaces, where they are employed to collect data about customer satisfaction. They are pretty ubiquitous, from shopping malls to airport toilets. It is unclear what the function of this data really is, as in if this quantification really has a function in the survey of retail and service performance, or if it the role of the gadgetry is more to feed graphs and statistics to portray a spectacle of tech-driven quantification for board meetings reports.

Inside the Happy or Not terminal one can find a microcontroller fed by four industrial-sized batteries, a 4G SIM card and a telephone network interface to communicate the button-press data to a central server. The finnish company rents the terminals to their clients, and provides a slick online interface to produce polished graphics and visualizations of the monthly data.