Clinton Jorge

Madeira Story Generator: Prospecting Serendipitous Storytelling in Public Spaces

Abstract In the light of the increasing adoption of participatory culture means by general consumers, this paper describes the design process, evaluations and discussion on four studies on public interactive storytelling system addressing findings and limitations in regards of its participatory nature. Previous bodies of work within interactive artworks and public displays cite difficulty in attracting passersby attention. Through an iterative design process and refinements to the storytelling concept, we advanced our experience of the mechanics of digital storytelling’ and passersby engagement within each space studied. This paper aims to share our research highlights, encountered difficulties and how the applied evaluation methods stood up to the task within public spaces that aren’t as easily accessible for research, such as airport terminals. Our findings further seek to go beyond a traditional technology-centered approach while examining the relationship between individual, object, and public spaces.

Storytelling and the Use of Social Media in Digital Art Installations

In recent times new story formats have appeared along with new media channels that allow more reach and target a broader pool of authors and audiences. This paper investigates the repurposing of a Solari Udine airport split-flap display as a new public channel/medium for storytelling. We explored the potential of this repurposed display through a high fidelity prototype positioned in a high density and flow area at the main entrance to a regional university. The content displayed consisted of stories by published authors as well as passersby. Stories could be sent to the display via Twitter, SMS and Facebook. We observed and reported the reactions of the invited authors as well as of the public. Through the analysis of the data collected with this study, we aim at advancing and supporting the design of interactive storytelling installations in public spaces.

Ambiguity in design: an airport split-flap display storytelling installation

This paper describes MStoryG, a digital art installation to be situated in a future open-air museum. Our goal with MStoryG is to provoke and engage visitors in collaborative storytelling by exploiting the ambiguity that visitors interpret from an airport split-flap display used as a medium for supporting Exquisite Corpse. In order to evaluate our concept we created a software replica of an airport split-flap display, deployed as an interactive public art installation. Visitors tweet, or through an adjacent laptop, contribute to the overall storytelling process by providing a story fragment that appears on the split-flap display for other visitors to read and build on. We argue that in the right conditions ambiguity can trigger curiosity and invite interaction, but special care is needed to avoid confusing and alienating users. Here we report on our ongoing public installation and next steps in deploying MStoryG with the physical board in locus.

Fostering ambiguity: decontextualizing and repurposing a familiar public display

Innovations in HCI tend to rely on exploring new technologies and novel forms of interaction. For decades artists such as Jenny Holzer have sought to provoke the public with art installations by repurposing public displays and exploring ambiguous messaging. Gaver argues that ambiguity can be intriguing, mysterious, and delightful, something that engages users and allows them to explore, discover, and interpret situations for themselves. In this paper we describe MStoryG, a public digital art installation that employs a decontextualized and repurposed airport split-flap display to support collaborative storytelling. In order to explore whether ambiguity attracts the glances of passersby and through curiosity invites interaction we devised a high fidelity software prototype that facilitated rapid deployment of experiments at two different locations. In addition to evaluating user engagement with the installation we define guidelines for others seeking to repurpose familiar objects in order to attract and engage passersby.

Watt-I-See: A Tangible Visualization of Energy

This paper describes a tangible visualization that explores the link between the impact of energy feedback on household consumers and the resource demand impact on energy production. Specifically, it positions a novel perspective attempting to move beyond the known limitations of current eco-feedback systems and contributes to enhance our understanding of how consumers comprehend energy production. The work is informed by a comprehensive study of an installation that displays the ratio of current power generation sources and the percentage of grid renewables. The paper provides design insights for creating novel eco-feedback visualizations that leverage the balance between user lifestyles and the desire to influence consumption behaviors and practices. Evaluation results show an increase in energy literacy and awareness as well as identifies high consumer preferences towards simple, representative interfaces and ubiquitous immediate feedback. Our study shows potential in terms of future scenarios for eco-feedback in distributed energy micro-generation and other inevitable disruptive changes for the energy utility.

MStoryG: Exploring Serendipitous Storytelling Within High Anxiety Public Spaces

The proliferation of interactive displays within public spaces has steered research towards exploring situated engagement, user interaction and user-generated content on public displays. However, user behaviors such as display blindness and display avoidance, social embarrassment and participation inequality are just some of the limiting factors restricting user commitment to interaction and participation. So-called “non-places”, which include transportation terminals, are homogenized public spaces that seem to exist outside conventional notions of time and identity. These anonymous, fast-paced, high-anxiety spaces provide a significant challenge for designers hoping to engage the attention of passersby. Our study proposes to go beyond a traditional technology-centered approach and examine the relationship between individual, object, and space. We attempt to engage airport travelers in serendipitous interactive storytelling through reminiscence and nostalgia. We present our “in-the-wild” study at the baggage claim area of an international airport where 26 h of observations and 49 semi-structured interviews were collected.

EnerSpectrum: exposing the source of energy through plug-level eco-feedack

This paper presents EnerSpectrum a standard wall electricity socket redesigned to present how much of the electricity being consumed is sourced from a renewable energy source. We build on studies that report an increase in consumer energy awareness and literacy when presented with the source of their electricity. The prototype was evaluated by 10 users using interviews, which found the concept interesting and valuable. We conclude this paper with an outline of the future work necessary to evaluate the EnerSpectrum in real live conditions.

Island Stories: The Madeira Story Generator Project

In this paper I describe an ongoing project at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (Madeira-ITI) that is concerned with making new discoveries in the field of creative writing through the use of repurposed technological artefacts. Recently the Madeira Story Generator (MStoryG) project has been conducting experiments in collaborative storytelling and exploring new authoring platforms using an analogue Solari Udine split-flap display—an old-style Arrivals board—formerly located at Madeira International Airport. The ‘hacked’ Arrivals board and a mirror software replica Departures board can receive messages via Twitter and Facebook. Using the physical and virtual boards we have looked into phenomena such as the attractive ambiguity of repurposed objects. We have also examined ways of engaging users with public storytelling and enticing them to collaborate and share their stories. In terms of content, we have staged a transatlantic Twitter fiction collaboration between our users (students and researchers at the University of Madeira), the New Orleans Review, and the US-based travel writing website Airplane Reading. In this and future experiments, we aim to discover new ways of engaging audiences and authors in new forms of creative writing and publishing by taking advantage of the possibilities of both old and new media channels.