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April 14, 2007
Lit Review - Enticing Users to Interact with a Public Display
Enticing People to Interact with Large Public Displays in Public Spaces (Brignull and Yvonne 2003)This paper describes a public display system for public spaces. More specifically it describes a system designed for large groups as sort of a ‘game’ or icebreaker. For example, the display might show a picture of Bill Gates, people in the audience could interact with the display using a laptop to add a comment about Bill Gates to a large public display. The authors deployed this display in two public areas, and observed how people interacted with it. It is important to note that the “public” in context of this paper means large groups, for example in both deployments the display was placed in large conference rooms with over 100 people attending each event. This is quite different from the more common ‘small group’ form of ‘public’ where ‘public display’ is normally used to describe a display situated in a hallway or in another ‘public’, but lower traffic area.
The paper primarily focuses on describing observations from the two system deployments. The authors found that their display exhibited a “honey-pot” affect, perhaps referring to the fact that the display became more popular once other users were using it. For example, when someone was writing a comment to the display, the display drew more attention, and thus was more prominent in the public space. The authors propose a theoretical framework to describe the types of interaction people have with public displays: peripheral awareness interactions, focal awareness, and direction interaction activities. They discuss the transition from interaction state to interaction state, at an observational level, but it appears that the state transition is similar to the Legitimate Peripheral Participation model described by Jean Lave. [I am also quite sure that this particular transitory approach to participation can be found in all public systems.] The authors flesh out this theoretical framework by describing some “obvious” requirements for users to transition between stages of use, for example, to transition from focal awareness to interaction activity, users must understand how long an interaction takes and what steps are involved. The paper concludes with antidotal guidelines for the design of public displays in large public areas, such as where to locate them in a room to entice people to interact, while noting that the greatest boundary to interaction with a public display is overcoming the fear “social embarrassment” and that such systems should be designed to prevent self-consciousness. Adding anonymity would solve some of these problems, but limit the social benefits of the display, i.e. someone would no longer be able to use the results of your ‘comment’ to the display as an icebreaker. In short, this paper has an interesting look at what it takes to get someone to interact with a large public display, but, they lack a firm theoretical base, and it would seem that their same “theoretical” principles would apply to people singing karaoke (one moves from being peripherally aware of the singing, to watching it, to participating). In any case, it is interesting to see the parallels between “public games” such as karaoke and what can be done with a public display designed to foster conversation.
Brignull, H. and R. Yvonne (2003). Enticing people to interact with large public displays in public spaces. Interact.
Design Guidelines that affect us:
- Make having an understanding from a distance possible
- Place the interaction console near the traffic
- Make registering as easy as possible
- Simplify interaction
Posted by bcx at April 14, 2007 09:54 PM