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April 15, 2007
Lit review - Sharing Multimedia Content with Interactive Public Displays
Sharing Multimedia Content with Interactive Public Displays: A Case Study (Churchill, Nelson et al. 2004)This paper presents a very detailed account of the deployment three “Plasma Posters” in the FX-PAL research lab. The authors do a really good job of describing the design of a public display system where users in the environment could send email to the displays and have the contents of the email, or the contents of what the email references (i.e. movies, images, web pages) displayed on 3 large public touch screen plasma displays in their research lab. They note that the deployment made very little difference to other communication genres used by the lab, i.e. the deployment of the Plasma Posters did not reduce the number of emails sent over the listserv, or reduce the usage of the office bulletin boards. They describe the successful adoption and usage patterns for their system, while providing insights into why their system succeeded: participatory design – giving users ownership, design for low effort of use – and in-line with existing practices, supporting flexible use, reliability, social context (tie posts to real users of the system), the list goes one. The authors conclude with a discussion of 2 other deployments of Plasma Poster systems noting the importance of “social setting as an interface”, as these deployments (A café and an office building) both required interface modifications, and changes in the governance of the display. The authors found that the way in which the display is used is as mitigated by the setting in which it is deployed as the actual interface of the display. The primary contribution of this paper towards our research is providing us with design guidelines, and ideas for the basic methodology to take when studying technology deployments over time.
Churchill, E. F., L. Nelson, L. Denoue, J. Helfman and P. Murphy (2004). Sharing multimedia content with interactive public displays: a case study. Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques. Cambridge, MA, USA, ACM Press.
I would just like to say, that this particular study is the BEST public display study I have read so far. (That is not saying too much, considering I have read a lot of "system only" papers, and not to many evaluation papers so far, but it is still worth noting.)
Posted by bcx at April 15, 2007 03:47 AM