A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information SystemsCitizen participation as a key priority of open cities, gives citizens the chance to
influence public decision-making. Effectively engaging broader types of citizens into
high participation levels has long been an issue due to various situational and technical
constrains. Traditional public participation technologies (e.g. public hearing)
usually are blame for low accessibility by the general public. The development of
Information Communication Technology brings new methods to engage a broader
spectrum of citizens in deeper participation level during urban planning processes.
Interactive public displays as a public communication medium, hold some key advantages
in comparison to other media. Compared to personal devices, public displays
make public spaces into sociable places, where social communication and interaction
can be enriched without intentionally or unintentionally excluding some groups’
opinions. Public displays can increase the visibility of public events while it is more
flexible and up-to-date regarding showing information. Besides, they can also foster
a collective awareness and support group behavioral changes. Moreover, due to the
public nature of public displays, they provide broad accessibility to different groups
of citizens.
Public displays have a great potential in bringing new opportunities to facilitate
public participation in an urban planning process. In the light of previous work on
public displays, the research goal is to investigate a relatively new form of citizen
participation known as Public Display Participation. This participation form refers to
the use of public displays for citizen participation in the context of urban planning.
The main research question of the thesis is how public displays can be used for
facilitating citizen consultation in an urban planning process. First, a systematic
literature review is done to get an understanding of the current achievements and
gaps of research on public displays for public participation. Second, an elicitation
study has been conducted to design end user centered interactions with public
displays for citizens’ consulting activities. Finally, we run a usability to evaluate the
usability of public displays for citizen consultation and their user experience.
The main contributions of this thesis can be summarized as: (1) the identification
of key challenges and opportunities for future research in using public displays
for public participation in urban contexts; (2) two sets of user-defined gestures
for two sets of user-defined phone gestures and hand gestures for performing
eleven consulting activities, which are about examining the urban planning designs
and giving feedback related to design alternatives, are also identified. (3) a new
approach for using public displays for voting and commenting in urban planning,
and a multi-level evaluation of a prototypical system implementing the proposed
approach. Designers and researchers can use the contributions of this thesis, to
create interactive public displays for supporting higher public participat i.e.
citizen collaboration and empowerment
