Saul Greenberg

Readings in Public Displays

This page collects various readings related to public displays, a research area of interest to us. It is under construction and evolving.

  1. Pervasive Displays Proceedings (Saul has it)
  2. Jorg Muller's work on public dispays
    Looking Glass Paper and Looking Glass Video. ACM CHI 2012
  3. Giulio Jaccucci;s work on public dispays
    Worlds of Information: Designing for Engagement at a Public Multi-touch Display ACM CHI 2010.
  4. The Participatory Museum Chapter 4 may be relevant.
  5. Conveying interactivity at an interactive public information display.Kazjon Grace, Rainer Wasinger, Christopher Ackad, Anthony Collins, Oliver Dawson, Richard Gluga, Judy Kay, and Martin Tomitsch. 2013. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19-24. DOI=10.1145/2491568.2491573 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2491568.2491573
  6. Nemanja Memarovic, Marc Langheinrich, Florian Alt, Ivan Elhart, Simo Hosio, and Elisa Rubegni. 2012. Using public displays to stimulate passive engagement, active engagement, and discovery in public spaces. In Proceedings of the 4th Media Architecture Biennale Conference: Participation (MAB '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 55-64. DOI=10.1145/2421076.2421086 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2421076.2421086
  7. JayShree Movie

Notes

From Saul

Given that strangers may see them, and they need to be understood immediately, how do they learn it? So, the challenge is how to promote discovery on systems like these.

  1. Role of mirroring – seeing yourself projected (or an abstract version of yourself) appears to be an important factor. But how much fidelity is required? Do we need to show person, or can we somehow emphasize the interactive parts (.e.g, hands, body motion, etc) so people understand what the system is responding too?
  2. Role of effects – how do people know what to do? It would seem that we would have to show an effect almost immediately, so that people understand that they are controlling something. In your video, for example, people need to understand how they can make things grow, which I suspect can be easily missed.

And there are likely other issues too.

From David:

  • Other things that immediately pop into my head are how we can use things like the principles of animation (I have a lot of references ranging from perception theory of motion to actual animation books). In terms of design, I think this is important, as motion is the first visual cue that we get, and different animation effects (even if it's just very abstract particles) may lead people into it.
  • Another aspect (this one I'm a bit more iffy about), is that we might be able to find things in psychology that explore engagement, intrinsic motivation, and compliance. I think there might be some interesting theories that explore how lead people into the interaction incrementally, perhaps having tasks that would trigger curiosity (implicit or explicitly).

From Frederik:

I agree with you, people need to know they can interact with a display in the first place. Also they need to know how the interaction works. We tried to consider that in our work. We used a particle system which would pop up around the silhouette of a passerby to attract attention and a glowing bottom-border to get peoples hands down, but for timely reasons the prototype was not very good on that. So this topic sounds very interesting!

Another question I find interesting is not only how people are attracted to interact with public displays, but also why would people interact with it. Playfulness? Curiosity? Because other people are watching and/or doing it too? Weak form of cockiness? ...?

Work that came to my mind:

  • Magical Mirrors by Daniel Michelis (who also worked with Jörg Müller, mentioned by David):
  • Work outside of HCI research (such as advertising). Even if it's just to draw attention to e.g. the window and not advertising primarily, it seems that some companies use it to gather people around the shops. T-Labs has done it with the Looking Glass in a Telekom-Shop. Further I've seen it with a shop in Munich, which used an installation and every time I passed it lots of people were playing with it (see video above)
  • I second David's point about the purpose of the installation. "Traditional" advertisement might need more aggressive ways to attract attention than playful advertisement, etc.