Enticing People to Interact with Large Public Displays in Public Spaces

Large displays are increasingly being placed in public places to support community and social activities. However, a major problem that has been observed with this new form of public interaction is the resistance by the public to participate. A main reason is due to the prominence of the affective aspect of the user experience. In particular, feelings of social embarrassment often act as a barrier. Our paper is concerned with understanding why this is the case and considering how we can attempt to overcome these aspects through improving the design of public interaction. Our focus is on how groups of people socialize around large public displays, the way they move towards them, congregate around them and change from being onlookers to participants and back again. We describe a system – the Opinionizer – which we designed and placed in two authentic social gatherings, intended to encourage socializing and interaction. We present our findings in terms of the patterns of physical and social engagement that take place around it. We then present a model of public interaction flow, which we use as the basis from which to provide design recommendations for encouraging public participation.