Classifying public display systems: an input/output channel perspective

Public display screens are relatively recent additions to our world, and while they may be as simple as a large screen with minimal input/output features, more recent developments have introduced much richer interaction possibilities supporting a variety of interaction styles. In this paper we propose a framework for classifying public display systems with a view to better understanding how they differ in terms of their interaction channels and how future installations are likely to evolve. This framework is explored through 15 existing public display systems which use mobile phones for interaction in the display space

PuReWidgets : a programming toolkit for interactive public display applications

Interaction is repeatedly pointed out as a key enabling element towards more engaging and valuable public displays. Still, most digital public displays today do not support any interactive features. We argue that this is mainly due to the lack of efficient and clear abstractions that developers can use to incorporate interactivity into their applications. As a consequence, interaction represents a major overhead for developers, and users are faced with inconsistent interaction models across different displays. This paper describes the results of a study on interaction widgets for generalized interaction with public displays. We present PuReWidgets, a toolkit that supports multiple interaction mechanisms, automatically generated graphical interfaces, asynchronous events and concurrent interaction. This is an early effort towards the creation of a programming toolkit that developers can incorporate into their public display applications to support the interaction process across multiple display systems without considering the specifics of what interaction modality will be used on each particular display.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Investigating Clientless Mobile Phone Interaction with a Bluetooth Public Display

Interactive public displays are becoming more prevalent than ever before. The costs of large displays are coming down and the ubiquity of mobile devices allows for novel interactions with such displays. Bluetooth has been used to interact with such displays in the past, but sharing of complex information with the display has required a phone application. Not all phones however can utilise Bluetooth via an application. This paper investigates the feasibility of sharing complex notices found on traditional notice boards with a public display without using a phone application, as well as the interaction design process in creating a display with such a novel interaction method. The notices use standard data formats such as vCards, vEvents and photos

MobiLenin combining a multi-track music video, personal mobile phones and a public display into multi-user interactive entertainment

This paper introduces a novel and creative approach for coupling multimedia art with a non-conventional distributed humancomputer interface for multi-user interactive entertainment. The proposed MobiLenin system allows a group of people to interact simultaneously with a multi-track music video shown on a large public display using their personal mobile phones, effectively empowering the group with the joint authorship of the video. The system is realized with a client-server architecture which includes server-driven real-time control of the client UI to guarantee ease of use and a lottery mechanism as an incentive for interaction. Our analysis of the findings of an empirical user evaluation conducted in a true environment of use shows that the MobiLenin system is successful, addressing many of the challenges identified in the literature. The proposed system offers a new form of interactive entertainment for pubs and other public places, and the underlying architecture provides a framework for realizing similar installations with different types of multimedia content

Community-based digital bulliten boards and mobile phone interaction

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-61).Our thesis is that a networked public display/kiosk system, that provides information for a local community, functions best when it is decentralized and interactive. We deployed such a system at MIT that has two aspects, DomeView for distributed decentralized display and content distribution, and PhoneView for enhanced user consumption of that content. PhoneView is an implementation that we propose to solve a number of issues with current interactive public kiosk deployments, as well as enables scenarios of enhanced interactions. By using the Hands-Free Bluetooth profile as the basis for the communication between a mobile phone and a kiosk, we provide an enhanced personalized interaction for all passersby with Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, without requiring the installation of custom software. Some examples include the ability to remotely control a kiosk, exchange calendar and contact data with the kiosk, and play games on a kiosk with other users via one's mobile phone. By removing the software installation barrier and providing new mechanisms of public interaction, this implementation is ripe for wide-spread and immediate adoption across multiple public kiosk platforms.by Harel M. Williams.M.Eng

Empowering Mobile Art Practice : A Recontextualization of Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing

Creating art with mobile phones in public spaces is an emerging form of artistic expression. This dissertation investigates the design and use of mobile art applications for creating and sharing interactive art experiences in public spaces. It explores new ways of deploying mobile and ubiquitous computing for art making that fosters creativity and community. This is done by developing a series of novel prototype applications, with a focus on multimodal interfaces that are put into use in authentic environments for validation by real people. The approach is to couple an artistically motivated design and innovation process with mobile, web and public display technologies, in order to explore the prototypes that build the empirical framework of this research. Multimodal interfaces address many of the human senses, such as seeing, hearing, touching; they thus provide powerful user experiences. Combining spaces with different modalities provides new possibilities for real-time interaction and engaging experiences. But there is a problem in that little is known about how to design multimodal interfaces and systems to work in the context of the city as digital interface, especially how to enable participatory, real-time interaction in urban space to foster creativity and togetherness. The resulting mobile art applications signal a new era in digital creativity, as they show the strengths of future mobile interactive platforms. The key points are providing engaging experiences of mass participation both locally and physically distributed; enabling creativity; and promoting real-time interaction not only between ‘people and people’ or ‘people and machines’ but also between ‘people and things’, such as nature, buildings, objects and the physical environment generally. These forthcoming approaches will lead to designs and implementations of new mobile interaction platforms, which eventually will lead us to new leisure time activities, such as creating and sharing art experiences in public space, but also to new ways of living an art- and culture-inspired lifestyle - empowering mobile art practice

Designing digital and physical interactions for the Digital Public Space

Over the course of the last decade there has been a perceivable shift in the way interactions occur with digital systems with a clear preference towards touchscreen based interactions. This move can be attributed in part to the Apple’s iPhone, first introduced in 2007, and whilst not the first touchscreen product, it was the first to lead to widespread adoption and use. This thesis seeks to develop new design interaction methods that recognise that we are moving away from a dominance of digital interactions with screens to one where interactions are supported by everyday things. These devices allow greater perspectives to be gained than when purely interacting by touchscreen. This is presented as an exploration of interaction methods surrounding intermediary objects that are both physical and digital in nature - phygital. Affordances are an important part of how people interact with devices in their everyday life; it is these affordances that let us understand how to use things around us. Affordances are also present in the digital world and are an important part of how the work presented in this thesis analysed the design of the phygital objects and interactions they enabled. This thesis draws on six case studies from a diverse range of projects undertaken as part of The Creative Exchange research project. Beginning with an exploration of current touchscreen interaction methods then moving towards identifying and suggesting new interaction models. Throughout this research, key ideas will be extracted, rationalised and presented individually for each Creative Exchange project, in such a way that allows conclusions to be drawn about physical and digital interactions in the Digital Public Space. Finally, this body of work concludes with a design manifesto which, provides a route away from strict screen interactions to one where more physical Natural User Interfaces that interact with the world. The manifesto will also serve prospective phygital interaction designers in the production of new interactions by identifying key findings such as matching affordances to the phygital objects

Designing the vote : an exploration of electronic voting as a tool for political participation

PhD ThesisThis thesis describes my attempt to envisage electronic voting as a tool for political engagement by challenging the conventional understanding of the role of technology in democracy as only facilitating ‘politics’ referring to the means, structures and mechanisms that enable governing. This entails the reappropriation of voting as a tool that embeds methods for dissent to be democratically manifested, and the discovery of novel ways with which voting systems can be designed to encourage citizen involvement in political processes; from setting up polls and political canvassing to voting and political deliberation. I materialize this novel conceptualization of voting by introducing a design framework that enables us to rethink the capacities of systems to support various democratic contexts. We instantiate this framework for the design and development of novel voting prototypes that we later deploy in collaboration with local communities in Newcastle upon Tyne and Cambridge in order to gain an understanding of how their affordances and contextual parameters influence political participation. As a result, in this thesis we present a number of case studies incorporating new designs, empirical methods and findings that begin to explore this conceptualisation of voting as a tool for political engagement. More specifically, we explore: (i) the reappropriation of voting as not only supporting the doing of politics, but also the participation of the involved stakeholders in a political process; (ii) the capacities of voting systems that enable this profound citizen participation to be materialised in local contexts and the possible change that might result from this; and (iii) the contextual parameters affecting citizen engagement in voting such as the system’s ownership and the authority to drive political agendas. In doing so, we offer new insights into the potential of voting to support political engagement and participation

Living the urban experience: Implications for the design of everyday computational technologies.

This dissertation addresses the challenges of designing computational technologies that are used in a variety of everyday occasions. Specifically, it focuses on urban computing, the study of, and design for, the experience of inhabiting and traversing urban environments. Using a phenomenological perspective to approach lived urban experiences in terms of their situated aspects and the ways in which they are understood by both designers and users, this dissertation seeks to create a categorisation of urban life that reflects its richness while reducing its complexity, in order to guide the design of new everyday computational technologies. The dissertation will show how such a theoretical standpoint leads to a study of researchers and designers directly engaging with a variety of urban experiences - waiting in public places in London, being in transitional spaces in Orange County, visiting public toilets in Amsterdam and commuting by the London Underground - through fieldwork and design. The hermeneutic phenomenology-inspired analysis of the data collected from such activities will support the emergence of a new categorisation of urban life called "in-between-ness". This categorisation reflects the tensions proper to the urban experience, and acts as an actionable tool for reflection, which identifies both sites for design - awareness, engagement and legitimisation - and potential design approaches to those sites - integrate with, mirror and alter. This dissertation will conclude with a discussion of the ways in which this new categorisation of in-between-ness presents a starting point for researchers to reflect on the variety of trends emerging within urban computing, and inspiration for the design of new everyday computational technologies