Dimensions of situatedness for digital public displays

Public displays are often strongly situated signs deeply embedded in their physical, social, and cultural setting. Understanding how the display is coupled with on-going situations, its level of situatedness, provides a key element for the interpretation of the displays themselves but is also an element for the interpretation of place, its situated practices, and its social context. Most digital displays, however, do not achieve the same sense of situatedness that seems so natural in their nondigital counterparts. This paper investigates people’s perception of situatedness when considering the connection between public displays and their context. We have collected over 300 photos of displays and conducted a set of analysis tasks involving focus groups and structured interviews with 15 participants. The contribution is a consolidated list of situatedness dimensions that should provide a valuable resource for reasoning about situatedness in digital displays and informing the design and development of display systems

Pins and posters: paradigms for content publication on situated displays

Public display systems are still far from being a communication medium that people can appropriate to serve diverse communication goals. Moving towards open displays will require new publication paradigms that can overcome the challenges of meaningful engagement and enable users to fully understand and control the entire publication process. In this paper, we report on the study of two novel and complimentary communication paradigms for public displays inspired by the metaphors of pin badges and posters. The study is grounded on a 6 month deployment of Instant Places across 10 displays in diverse urban locations. We have collected user and system data regarding the emerging practices around these publication paradigms. The findings from this study constitute a novel contribution towards understanding the elements that may drive user-generated content in networks of urban displays, informing the design of new tools and procedures for situated publication in public displays.The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement 244011

Media sharing in an open network of place-based displays

In this study, we aim to uncover emerging media practices for open place-based displays and understand how people appropriate the opportunities created by this new medium. Based on usage data from 43 displays, we study the role played by different publication paradigms, more specifically subscription of pre-defined content channels, integration of arbitrary content sources from social media and direct media creation. The results suggest that these different publication paradigms can all play an important role in an open model for public displays and that they complement each other in a very flexible way. This seems to confirm that openness can represent an important step towards more effective and more relevant uses of large screen displaysProject 11304 (16/SI/2015) , supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A survey of pervasive displays for information presentation

Weiser’s seminal vision of ubiquitous computing had calm information presentation at its heart and identified an important challenge in providing pervasive yet unobtrusive information display while avoiding problems of information overload. Since this vision was first articulated, a range of approaches have emerged for presenting information on pervasive displays and digital screens of varying sizes are now an everyday feature of our environments. Such displays provide significant opportunities for presenting information in-situ to support users in a range of activities, and the growing expectation is that there is constant peripheral access to digital information. In this article we review three different pervasive display technologies used for information presentation: traditional 2D display media, urban media facades, and novel display hardware. Our survey identifies five emerging trends that cross all three technologies: an increasing focus on situatedness, a movement towards non-expert users, growing demand for accessible interaction, a potential for new applications of data, and a difficulty in balancing ‘calm’ computing against presentation of data at an appropriate granularity and complexity

Planning Obsolescence: Generational Labor, Welcoming Crisis, and Actualizing Immaterial Bonds

The 2008 economic crisis crippled the global public higher education sector, leaving a generation questioning the practicalities of pursuing higher education. In response to the neoliberalization of the public university, I examine the proliferation of DIY ethics and practices Millennials (AKA the Recession Generation) have strategically developed to evade institutions that further indebt their members. I further examine how the Recession Generation shapes affective labor, also described as immaterial labor, which serves as a necessary condition in the informational age of late capitalism. In examining a range of DIY sites, I show how Millennials strategically develop para-academic practices in order to rewrite harmful institutional practices that reify and weaponize static identitarian categories

Enactivism and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as tools for expanding Universal Design for Learning: the case of visually impaired mathematics students

Blind and visually impaired mathematics students must rely on accessible materials such as tactile diagrams to learn mathematics. However, these compensatory materials are frequently found to offer students inferior opportunities for engaging in mathematical practice and do not allow sensorily heterogenous students to collaborate. Such prevailing problems of access and interaction are central concerns of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an engineering paradigm for inclusive participation in cultural praxis like mathematics. Rather than directly adapt existing artifacts for broader usage, UDL process begins by interrogating the praxis these artifacts serve and then radically re-imagining tools and ecologies to optimize usability for all learners. We argue for the utility of two additional frameworks to enhance UDL efforts: (a) enactivism, a cognitive-sciences view of learning, knowing, and reasoning as modal activity; and (b) ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA), which investigates participants’ multimodal methods for coordinating action and meaning. Combined, these approaches help frame the design and evaluation of opportunities for heterogeneous students to learn mathematics collaboratively in inclusive classrooms by coordinating perceptuo-motor solutions to joint manipulation problems. We contextualize the thesis with a proposal for a pluralist design for proportions, in which a pair of students jointly operate an interactive technological device

Introduction:The Sites, Materialities and Practices of Interreligious Encounters in Europe

This introduction asks about the multiple forms, power effects, fragility and contested nature of interreligious encounters in Europe from various social science perspectives. With ‘interreligious dialogue’ initiatives being promoted in many societies, research on the topic has expanded. Attention has been devoted to dialogue as a tool to promote social cohesion and integration in societies marked by migration-driven religious diversity. However, research on the intertwined effects of the sites, materialities and practices of ‘the interreligious’ is scarce, especially with regard to the production and contentious transformation of identities, mechanisms of belonging and power relations in local contexts. To address this gap, the contributions to Interreligious Encounters in Europe: Sites, Materialities and Practices focus on the situated articulations of interreligious encounters and dialogues by examining how different encounters are framed, expressed and practised. Drawing on 9 empirical case studies from various countries, the contributions (a) shed light on the subjectivities, relations and modes of behaviour produced, negotiated and contested in and through locally embedded interreligious encounters and dialogue-oriented practices; (b) observe the power dynamics that shape those practices and encounters; and (c) discuss their implications for the place(s) of religion in the public sphere. The volume provides insights into the commonalities and specificities of interreligious encounters, politics and practices across different settings

Curated language learning spaces: Design principles of physical 21st century language centers

This article develops a set of design principles for 21st century language centers. It is based on a 2013 survey of language center directors and staff for the International Association for Language Learning and Technology (IALLT). The proposed criteria, which are flexibility and adaptability, mission-based design, situatedness, social space and community design, and de-emphasis of technology, offer a new direction in the physical and conceptual design of 21st century language learning spaces