Reflections on Long-Term Experiments with Public Displays

SMS had been demonstrated only two years previously; and the first Bluetooth specification would not arrive for another three years. Regrettably, we were forced to remove one of our FLUMP stations from a public area after a short time because of fire safety concerns—our first hint that deployment “in the wild” brought its own unique set of challenges. From those challenges, we learned many lessons. It is our goal here to present both the highlights from our longterm experiments with public displays and to clarify what those lessons were for the benefit of other researchers.