Harvesting the Interactive Potential of Digital Displays in Public Space: The Poetics of Public Interaction

A digital public display is a platform of media architecture that can either take the form of a large-size stand-alone screen, which relies on LED, LCD or plasma technology, or else a video projection that illuminate the façades of buildings in dark settings. Like nondigital advertising billboards since the nineteenth-century, digital public displays typically tend to be used to deliver commercial content, publicize news and offer context-relevant information in accordance with the elementary one-way transmission model of communication. As a result, until recently, most public media displays remained non-interactive. But now that computational systems can support digitally-mediated interactions on this platform, interactive screen technology is becoming an increasingly common component of new urban digital infrastructures in semi-public and public space. This doctoral research examines how the interactive potential of digital public displays might be unleashed at the scale of the built environment if designers were to focus on their public vocation and their social affordances. In the past decade, display-based systems have mostly been studied, designed and produced top-down style by experts. However, some researchers have called for new methodologies that could help effectively bridge the gap between the top-down prescriptive design approaches and the bottom-up appropriative digital practices that shape the in situ usages of this urban technology. This doctoral work strives to take up this challenge by demonstrating that multisited design is an approach that can be used to shape the conception and function of interactive digital public displays in the context of urban infrastructural planning. An interpretive outcome of participant observation, this dissertation also reports on field observations made over two years, presented as a narrative punctuated with micro-analyses on design research. This further contributes to the literature by, first, implicitly suggesting throughout that the concept of real time public interaction can provide an abstraction that facilitates thinking about the design of interactive digital public displays; second, presenting thick descriptions that evoke four new possible purposes for this platform; and third, developing the concept of social affordances tailored to public space

Borealis sound an interactive wall for situational awareness: The impact of responsive architecture on users

This paper refers to the presence of visual communication elements in public spaces using interactive multimedia surfaces. The state of the art, the development of a proposal, and its evaluation are presented. The interactive surface applies to school of music “Escola de Música do Conservatório Nacional,” to which a design project was done in an academic context. The proposal aims to explore the incorporation of digital multimedia surfaces enhancing new dynamics while users walk in the interior of the building. Visual content will be displayed, and the interaction between users and the multimedia surfaces is done by the sounds produce by people and instruments. To assess the intuitive nature and relevance of the proposal, satisfaction and usability tests were conducted with the potential users. It was concluded that users appreciated the proposal and was able to perceive the effect people’s presence have in the interaction with the multimedia surface.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Seeing the City Digitally

This book explores what's happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life

Exhibition design + contemporary encounters

This research is practice-based and explores the role of exhibition designer, the parameters of exhibition design and the exhibition design techniques that affect the experience of art in an institutional setting. Investigating the design methodology of current standard institutional practice in contemporary art display and audience engagement, techniques and strategies are researched, tested and developed to activate gallery space as medium. The research investigates techniques that can be constructed and implemented in exhibition design that provide engaging experiences for the viewer that are manifold in an institutional context

Seeing the City Digitally

This book explores what's happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life