Plymouth Past, Sustainable Future

On Saturday 14 November 2015 Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery hosted an event which formed part of the Economic & Social Research Council’s (ESRC) annual Festival of Social Science. The interdisciplinary public engagement event (organised by Professor Kim Stevenson) was entitled Plymouth Past: Sustainable Future and involved interactive displays and exhibitions of the work of several members of the Plymouth University School of Law on this year’s ESRC theme of sustainability The exhibition focused on 3 main aspects: social, cultural and environmental sustainability

Multifaceted Promotion and Outreach of Banned Books Week Library Programming

Are you interested in how to better engage your community through marketing, outreach and social media? If yes, then download and listen to this narrated PowerPoint as we share our strategies for diversified and interactive library promotion. Through illustrating the Raynor Memorial Libraries’ Banned Books Week campaign, this presentation will deliver numerous strategies on how to reach your audience where they are and bring them into the library. Topics covered will include program development, cross-campus collaboration, creating an interactive LibGuide and displays, promoting events through campus media, and documenting the event through photos and videos

INTERACTIVE EMPATHY AND LEADER EFFECTIVENESS: AN EVALUATION OF HOW SENSING EMOTION AND RESPONDING WITH EMPATHY INFLUENCE CORPORATE LEADER EFFECTIVENESS

Empathy has been shown to be a very powerful social and work ability. This study surveyed 754 employees of a privately held eastern United States company, and incorporated annual performance evaluations to empirically link interactive empathy to leader performance of 102 leaders. Data was collected from the leader’s followers, peers, and supervisors and from self-report personality evaluations. The results of this study show that leaders that are willing to engage their followers with empathic displays are seen as better leaders from their supervisors and have more engaged employees. Other contributions of this study include validation of the interactive empathy scale in a corporate environment and empirical support to show how interactive empathy adds incremental explanatory power of leader’s performance above and beyond that explained by personality. Directions for future research and practical implications of these results are also offered

The Case for Studying In-Store Media

The term “in-store media” refers to displays in retail establishments as diverse as supermarkets, department stores, and specialty clothing boutiques. In many countries these displays are becoming digital and interactive. They tie into people’s hand-held mobile lives, transforming the ways retailers relate to one another and their customers. Yet despite these displays’ longstanding and growing importance, media researchers have neglected in-store phenomena. Indeed, researchers’ scant attention to this type of media has led them to miss out on fascinating developments with potentially important social implications. This paper aims to encourage research on retailing by suggesting the utility of a media industries perspective. The framework points to the value of studying the production and circulation of digital and physical marketing materials that merchants use to target shoppers. Preliminary work from this viewpoint reveals new data-led approaches to customer relationships that raise questions about when and how retail-based media reinforce, extend, and shape anti-pluralistic, even anti-democratic, processes and perceptions

Analysing Pedestrian Traffic Around Public Displays

This paper presents a powerful approach to evaluating public technologies by capturing and analysing pedestrian traffic using computer vision. This approach is highly flexible and scales better than traditional ethnographic techniques often used to evaluate technology in public spaces. This technique can be used to evaluate a wide variety of public installations and the data collected complements existing approaches. Our technique allows behavioural analysis of both interacting users and non-interacting passers-by. This gives us the tools to understand how technology changes public spaces, how passers-by approach or avoid public technologies, and how different interaction styles work in public spaces. In the paper, we apply this technique to two large public displays and a street performance. The results demonstrate how metrics such as walking speed and proximity can be used for analysis, and how this can be used to capture disruption to pedestrian traffic and passer-by approach patterns

Assessing Feedback for Indirect Shared Interaction

Interaction is a key element in turning public displays into a platform for social interaction, making them more engaging and valuable. However, interactive features are still rare in public displays, due to the lack of generalised abstractions for incorporating interactivity. In our work, we explore to what extent the concept of interaction widget, which was so successful on desktop computers, could also be used as an abstraction for remote, shared interaction with public displays. A particular challenge is presenting input feedback in this shared, multi-user, and indirect interaction setting. In this paper, we present a study on the feedback mechanisms of these widgets, to determine if users are able to understand the results of interactions in single and multi-user settings. We have evaluated three feedback mechanisms and the results indicate that the general mechanism provides an appropriate sense of what is happening and could in fact provide general awareness of the interaction alternatives and current status, even in multi-user scenarios

You Can “Like” It on Paper Too: Reaching Digital Students through Analog Displays

In response to literature on libraries as space and the Millennial generation, this chapter speaks to the importance of the academic library as both social and communal space and how to communicate with today’s college students. These case studies illustrate that students can be reached through analog displays, building an unconscious community between students as a group and students with the library. Community built within the academic library is discussed in light of these analog displays, the current library literature and via sociological positions. It is concluded that although it is thought that students want digital or online communication only, the highest amount of interaction with displays come from the traditional, analog elements

Enter the Circle: Blending Spherical Displays and Playful Embedded Interaction in Public Spaces

Public displays are used a variety of contexts, from utility driven information displays to playful entertainment displays. Spherical displays offer new opportunities for interaction in public spaces, allowing users to face each other during interaction and explore content from a variety of angles and perspectives. This paper presents a playful installation that places a spherical display at the centre of a playful environment embedded with interactive elements. The installation, called Enter the Circle, involves eight chair-sized boxes filled with interactive lights that can be controlled by touching the spherical display. The boxes are placed in a ring around the display, and passers-by must “enter the circle” to explore and play with the installation. We evaluated this installation in a pedestrianized walkway for three hours over an evening, collecting on-screen logs and video data. This paper presents a novel evaluation of a spherical display in a public space, discusses an experimental design concept that blends displays with embedded interaction, and analyses real world interaction with the installation

GlobalFestival: Evaluating Real World Interaction on a Spherical Display

Spherical displays present compelling opportunities for interaction in public spaces. However, there is little research into how touch interaction should control a spherical surface or how these displays are used in real world settings. This paper presents an in the wild deployment of an application for a spherical display called GlobalFestival that utilises two different touch interaction techniques. The first version of the application allows users to spin and tilt content on the display, while the second version only allows spinning the content. During the 4-day deployment, we collected overhead video data and on-display interaction logs. The analysis brings together quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how users approach and move around the display, how on screen interaction compares in the two versions of the application, and how the display supports social interaction given its novel form factor