Peter Dalsgaard

Designing urban media façades: cases and challenges

Media façades comprise a category of urban computing concerned with the integration of displays into the built environment, including buildings and street furniture. This paper identifies and discusses eight challenges faced when designing urban media façades. The challenges concern a broad range of issues: interfaces, physical integration, robustness, content, stakeholders, situation, social relations, and emerging use. The challenges reflect the fact that the urban setting as a domain for interaction design is characterized by a number of circumstances and socio-cultural practices that differ from those of other domains. In order to exemplify the challenges and discuss how they may be addressed, we draw on our experiences from five experimental design cases, ranging from a 180 m2 interactive building façade to displays integrated into bus shelters.

Performing perception—staging aesthetics of interaction

In interaction design for experience-oriented uses of technology, a central facet of aesthetics of interaction is rooted in the users experience of herself “performing her perception.” By drawing on performance (theater) theory, phenomenology and sociology and with references to recent HCI-work on the relation between the system and the performer/user and the spectators relation to this dynamic, we show how the user is simultaneously operator, performer and spectator when interacting. By engaging with the system, she continuously acts out these three roles and her awareness of them is crucial in her experience. We argue that this 3-in-1 is always already shaping the users understanding and perception of her interaction as it is staged through her experience of the objects form and expression. Through examples ranging from everyday technologies utilizing performances of interaction to spatial contemporary artworks, digital as well as analogue, we address the notion of the performative spectator and the spectating performer. We demonstrate how perception is also performative and how focus on this aspect seems to be crucial when designing experience-oriented products, systems and services.

Reflective design documentation

Interaction design researchers doing research through design face not only the wicked problems in the practice of doing interaction design, but also the wicked problems that exist in the practice of doing research. In this paper we discuss the use of a tool developed for the specific purpose of documenting design projects and prompting reflection about design events as part of doing research through design. Based on cases lasting from nine to thirteen months we address specific benefits and challenges that we have encountered while employing the tool. Challenges concern roles and responsibilities, lack of routines, determining what to document, and finding the right level of detail. Benefits include support of shared reflection and discussion in on-going projects, the development, refining, and reflection upon research questions, scaffolding longitudinal and cross-project studies. Moreover, the benefits derived from entering design materials and other kinds of artefacts into a tool may not be achieved until must later, for instance when writing research publications.

Staging Urban Interactions with Media Façades

Using media facades as a subcategory of urban computing, this paper contributes to the understanding of spatial interaction, sense-making, and social mediation as part of identifying key characteristics of interaction with media facades. Our research addresses in particular the open-ended but framed nature of interaction, which in conjunction with varying interpretations enables individual sense-making. Moreover, we contribute to the understanding of flexible social interaction by addressing urban interaction in relation to distributed attention, shared focus, dialogue and collective action. Finally we address challenges for interaction designers encountered in a complex spatial setting calling for a need to take into account multiple viewing and action positions. Our research-through-design approach has included a real-life design intervention in terms of the design, implementation, and reflective evaluation of a 180 m2 (1937 square feet) interactive media facade in operation 24/7 for more than 50 days.

The emergence of ideas: the interplay between sources of inspiration and emerging design concepts

The development of new ideas is an essential concern for many design projects. There are, however, few in-depth studies of how such ideas emerge within these contexts. In this article we offer an analysis of the emergence of ideas from specific sources of inspiration, as they arise through negotiation and transformation, and are mediated by design artefacts during an Inspiration Card Workshop, a collaborative event in which findings from domain studies are combined with technological sources of inspiration, in order to generate design concepts. We present a micro-analytic study of the interwoven social and artefact-mediated interactions in the workshop, and identify essential phenomena that structure and create momentum in the development of new design concepts, namely (1) the manifest properties of Inspiration Cards and Concept Posters as physical props for encouraging and supporting design moves, (2) the semantic dimensions of the cards and posters as catalysts for discussion, derivation and ideation, and (3) ad hoc external sources of inspiration as means of supplementing and developing design concepts. The analysed design situation is characterised as being socially distributed, artefactually mediated, adaptive and emergent.

3d projection on physical objects: design insights from five real life cases

3D projection on physical objects is a particular kind of Augmented Reality that augments a physical object by projecting digital content directly onto it, rather than by using a mediating device, such as a mobile phone or a head-mounted display. In this paper, we present five cases in which we have developed installations that employ 3D projection on physical objects. The installations have been developed in collaboration with external partners and have been put into use in real-life settings such as museums, exhibitions and interaction design laboratories. On the basis of these cases, we present and discuss three central design insights concerning new potentials for well-known 3D effects, dynamics between digital world and physical world, and relations between object, content and context.

Designing for inquisitive use

This paper presents the concept of inquisitive use and discusses design considerations for creating experience-oriented interactive systems that inspire inquisitive use. Inquisitive use is based on the pragmatism of John Dewey and defined by the interrelated aspects of experience, inquiry, and conflict. The significance of this perspective for design is explored and discussed through two case-studies of experience-oriented installations. The paper contributes to the expanding discourse on experience design on a theoretical level by exploring one particular facet of interaction, inquisitive use, and on a practical level by discussing implications for design prompted by insights into inquisitive use. These implications are presented as a set of design sensitivities, which provide contextual insights and considerations for ongoing and future design processes.This paper presents the concept of inquisitive use and discusses design considerations for creating experience-oriented interactive systems that inspire inquisitive use. Inquisitive use is based on the pragmatism of John Dewey and defined by the interrelated aspects of experience, inquiry, and conflict. The significance of this perspective for design is explored and discussed through two case-studies of experience-oriented installations. The paper contributes to the expanding discourse on experience design on a theoretical level by exploring one particular facet of interaction, inquisitive use, and on a practical level by discussing implications for design prompted by insights into inquisitive use. These implications are presented as a set of design sensitivities, which provide contextual insights and considerations for ongoing and future design processes.

Towards a design space explorer for media facades

Collaborative design projects are often complex affairs in which a number of resources, concerns, and sources of inspiration are brought into play in the shaping of future design concepts. This paper presents the Design Space Explorer, a framework for managing these multiple sources of information and domain concerns in collaborative design projects. The Design Space Explorer captures and gives an overview of design materials and forms, domain locations and situations, interaction styles, and content types. Furthermore, it provides a platform for designers to combine these aspects into scenarios for design concepts. We present and discuss the use of the Design Space Explorer in two specific design cases in the domain of interactive media façades, part of the emerging field of digital urban living.

Understanding the dynamics of engaging interaction in public spaces

We present an analysis of three interactive installations in public spaces, in terms of their support of engagement as an evolving process. In particular, we focus on how engagement unfolds as a dynamic process that may be understood in terms of evolving relations between cultural, physical, content-related, and social elements of interactive environments. These elements are explored through the literature on engagement with interaction design, and it is argued that, although valuable contributions have been made towards understanding engagement with interactive environments, the ways in which engagement unfolds as a dynamic process remains relatively unexplored. We propose that we may understand engagement as a product of the four above-mentioned elements, and in our analysis we provide concrete examples of how engagement plays out in practice by analyzing the emergence, transformation and relations between these elements.

Challenges of participation in large-scale public projects

This paper examines challenges of participation in large-scale public projects. Taking its offset in a case-study, the development of a new public multimedia library, the paper discusses methods and values of Participatory Design in the face of the challenges that a project of this scale entails. These challenges concern how to address and manage a heterogeneous group of stakeholders and end-users, how to inform stakeholders and establish participation as a relevant activity, the development of new techniques and technologies to scaffold participation, and the interplay between iterative development and institutional transformation.This paper examines challenges of participation in large-scale public projects. Taking its offset in a case-study, the development of a new public multimedia library, the paper discusses methods and values of Participatory Design in the face of the challenges that a project of this scale entails. These challenges concern how to address and manage a heterogeneous group of stakeholders and end-users, how to inform stakeholders and establish participation as a relevant activity, the development of new techniques and technologies to scaffold participation, and the interplay between iterative development and institutional transformation.