Exploring Civic Engagement on Public Displays

Research and deployment of public interactive displays is moving from laboratory environments into urban spaces and public areas (Müller et al. 2010 ). Public displays augment the activities in the space around them by facilitating different use cases, such as public statements (Ananny and Strohecker 2009 ; Dalsgaard and Halskov 2010 ), play and performance (O’Hara et al. 2008 ; Hosio et al. 2012 ), or information foraging (Kukka et al. 2012 ). It is even envisioned that such public display installations will fuel the next big wave of social change (Kuikkaniemi et al. 2011 ). In our research we seek to augment urban space with public displays to promote civic engagement by addressing local and temporally and spatially relevant issues. Civic engagement lacks a unifi ed defi nition in literature, but in general it is perceived as an instrument for local governance and a foundation to empower people, often by informing citizens and utilizing feedback channels towards authorities (Mohammadi et al. 2011 ). Over a 2-year period, we incrementally evaluated applications that disseminate information about a long-term renovation project in Oulu, Finland. We used these applications to disseminate information about the construction work being done and by enabling users to provide in situ comments and feedback to the local Technical Centre (later TC). The TC is responsible for the execution of the renovation project, and while information provisioning has been of principal interest to them, our focus has also been on studying the characteristics of different situated feedback mechanisms in authentic city settings. Chapter 7 Exploring Civic Engagement on Public Displays