Claude Fortin

The appropriation of a digital "speakers" corner: lessons learned from the deployment of mégaphone

Interactive digital technologies embedded in urban spaces typically tend to be used to deliver news, context-relevant information and commercial advertisements. To design urban technologies that will serve other ends, we first need to know how people might want to interact with them. Using an ethnographic approach, we collected field data in order to better understand this. This study presents some of the findings of our qualitative evaluation of MÉGAPHONE, an interactive artistic installation deployed in a public space in downtown Montréal, Canada. In this paper, we provide thick descriptions of our detailed field observations and interviews with participants conducted over the ten-week deployment with a deep focus on how users appropriated this system. Our results highlight four public interaction strategies as a set of abstractions that suggest how people might want to make use of interactive public installations: place-making, self-representing, first-person news reporting and bootstrapping online presence with digital recordings.

Roles of an Interactive Media Façade in a Digital Agora

As a component of urban civic infrastructures, interactive screen technology is often studied, designed and produced top-down style to accommodate the diverging interests of its stakeholders. However, some HCI researchers are calling for new interaction design strategies that could help close the gap between top-down and bottom-up approaches in the study of situated interfaces used for civic engagement. Our paper reports on the public deployment of an interactive platform that might anticipate this next generation of situated interfaces. In Fall 2013, we conducted a ten-week qualitative field evaluation of Mégaphone, a digitally-augmented agora deployed in Montréals Quartier des Spectacles. Using ethnographic research methods, we collected data in-the-wild and conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with over 21 participants to understand why and how urbanites used the installation. This paper presents five conceptual categories that describe the most salient forms of interaction that we observed between users and Mégaphones voice-activated media façade.

Beyond the vision paradigm: design strategies for crossmodal interaction with dynamic digital displays

The purpose of our research is to develop new interaction paradigms for dynamic digital displays (DDDs) in public space. Our lab is currently developing an ontological framework that comprises seven different interaction paradigms for DDDs. Still in its budding stages, this framework is intended to assist HCI practitioners in the conception and evaluation of architectural scale DDD installations. This paper theoretically discusses crossmodal interaction as one of these seven interaction paradigms. We used an architectural approach that draws on medium specificity --- a fine arts concept foreign to HCI --- to conduct a phenomenological analysis of DDDs that have been deployed in an actual public space in Montréal, Canada. After interviewing DDD design artists and performing our preliminary observational analyses, we found four design strategies that were used to produce crossmodal interaction on an architectural scale, helping shift the experience of DDDs beyond the vision paradigm.