Dr Ian McArthur UNSW Art & Design
UNSW Australia Sydney, Australia
Dr Martin Tomitsch
Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning University of Sydney
Sydney, Australia
Luke Hespanhol
Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning University of Sydney
Sydney, Australia Abstract. As smart cities and media architecture attract
increasing attention globally, researchers, governments, urban planners, curators, artists and designers are questioning whether they can support urban sustainability and civic innovation through community engagement and social participation. As a widely proliferating form of urban media, large digital screens in particular provide a promising platform for engaging citizens in a dialogue on issues of local relevance. This paper discusses research concerned with techniques and tools for creating awareness and civic discourse about urban issues (e.g. use of public space, public safety, or new developments) and explores how meaningful interaction may be facilitated through the design of participatory urban media that prompt civic discourse and input from citizens. This research ‘in the wild’ aimed to develop and test methods that established a reproducible approach for programing urban screens to respond to a specific physical and socio-cultural environment.
Keywords: Civic participation, community engagement, urban media, urban planning, urban screens, media architecture, participatory design
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the last decade we have seen a proliferation of
large digital screens across cities around the world.
Placed in spaces such as public squares, railway stations, cultural precincts andshopping malls, these installations are often referred to as urban screens. In Australia the most iconic and successful example in terms of its
presence as a tool for engaging citizens and placemaking is the urban screen situated at Federation Square, Melbourne. Many local governments, developers and urban planners in Australia have subsequently attempted to emulate the “Federation Square Model” as it has become known as. Few have proved as successful, but recent developments such as The Concourse at
Chatswood in Sydney, and new developments like
Barangaroo on Sydney Harbour, and the Gold Coast Cultural Precinct all involve proposals for public spaces featuring large urban media in the form of digital screens.
However, the long-term social, cultural and economic potential of urban screens to vitally augment precincts depends on cities having effective tools to engage all stakeholders with a sense of agency that is grounded in openness, transparency and inclusion [1].
In part the failure to transpose the Federation Square model successfully to other sites is due to a lack of interdisciplinary consultation and collaboration at the planning and implementation phases of the process. A
key challenge in creating successful implementations of urban screens and other forms of urban media in public spaces is the critical requirement that they appropriately respond to not only the physical fabric of the built
environment but that they are coherent in the socio- cultural context in which they have been placed. In some ways we take the multiplicity of screensin our lives for
granted. As Murphie [2] asserts,
“It’s easy to forget what “screens” were only 50 years ago.
The “screen” meant cinema or TV. Interaction, at best, meant
fighting with one’s brothers or sisters over the knob on the
television set that changed channels. Now we have screens of every size, throughout our everyday world, from the small screens in our hands, to the very large screens in our public worlds.”[2].
We have also seenthat personal computing devices and increased mobility have led to the collapse of the idea
of the neighbourhood in which citizens would form communities around physical locations [3]. This contributes to citizens losing a sense of ownership about theurban environment and leaves them feeling detached from their local community. On the other hand, large
digital displays dohave the “potential to move beyond ‘ambient television’ to play a role in initiating new
collective interactions in public space” [4]. Urban
screens therefore could play a part in reconnecting citizens with their local neighbourhood, for instance by encouraging social interaction with other citizens[5] or a
dialogue with local governments [6]. Bernstein et al.
suggest [7] the networks of humans, artefacts, and the computers that form urban media environments provide a fundamental capacity for accessing collective or ‘civic
intelligence’ [8]. McQuire (2011) also notes recent conceptions of urban media suggest a potential for
developing “innovative tools for exploring new modes of
social interaction and cultural exchange”[4]. However,
although this capacity exists as a set of discreet technological components, the question is whether city stakeholders can deploy them in integrated
transformative ways useful to the overall wellbeing of citizens.
To further explore this question, researchers from UNSW Australia, University of Sydney and QUT in Brisbane conducted research ‘in the wild’ using the urban screen in Chatswood, Sydney. This paper examines how urban screens may be used to generate synergies between participatory IT, design anddata visualisation that add long-term social, cultural and economic value to urban precincts to: (a) encourage collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to urban planning and development issues relating to urban screens; (b) promote more open, livable, creative and engaging cities;
(c) create frameworks enabling participatory citizen engagement to foster thriving and sustainable urban communities; and (d) support innovation in town planning, urban development and land management.
The research has aimed to develop tools and strategies that could be used to help solve some of the programmatic problems associated with mediated urban spaces. Despite our technologies, a reproducible
framework for enabling participatory citizen engagement to foster thriving urban communities and ‘smart’ sustainable development remains elusive. Participatory engagement with the Chatswoodcommunity determined how to iteratively respond to opportunities and constraints around designing content, spatial layout,
interaction design, appropriate technologies, and how to integrate and apply human-computer interaction approaches.
This paper describes and evaluates interdisciplinary research funded by the Halloran Trust (University of Sydney). We begin by providing a background to the research in the field and discuss challenges to facilitating civic interaction and engagement within urban media environments. The aims and research methodology are then described in terms outlining a framework of
methods for facilitating participatory polling processes augmented by data visualisation of crowd-sourced
content. We follow this bydiscussingthetesting of two
different digital interfaces that form the ‘Vote As You Go’ polling platform [9]. The final section of paper evaluatesa range of design considerations, limitations of
the study, and conclusions highlighting a range of opportunities and challenges.
II. BACKGROUND
There are two dominant and closely related terminologies that describe urban media displays: urban screens and media façades [10][11]. The difference between these concepts is defined by the relationship of the screen itself to the architectural form and the urban site in which it is situated. Urban screens are typically freestanding in open public space or attached to the
façade of a building. The screen and the building are two distinct layers in terms of how they are technically facilitated and the manner in which they are perceived. If urban screens appear as freestanding, independent architectonic elements, they take on the single purpose to communicate media content [12].
Urban screens also provide a high-density information space with which to seek engagement with the public in urban placemaking. Technological advances in LCD and LED / OLED components havesupported the proliferation of urban screens of all scales throughout contexts as varied as cafes, retail outlets and outdoor urban streetscapes. Unfortunately however, in many instances the role of urban screens is relegated to that of advertising or simply playing muted television programming [13].
Parallel development in the availability of sensor
technologies provides enhanced opportunity to augment urban screens with interaction capacities enablingtouch [14] or gesture [15]to be a part of the user experience. This is a more enticing proposition from an interaction design perspective, largely because of the added potential for more participatory forms of implementation and application. Such interactive augmentations to the screen however present a number of new considerations and complex challenges to the designer:
People are often not aware of the interactive capabilities of a display, or might not notice the display at all [14].
New forms of interaction are required, since there is typically no mouse or keyboard available. Touch input, which has become the standard input mechanism on smartphones, is in many cases not practical due to distance between user and display and the form factors of the display [14]. Touch is further not well-accepted in public environments due to health risks associated with touching the surface of the display [117]. This has prompted interaction designers to trial gestural interaction techniques [16][17].
Interactions at public displays are typically of opportunistic nature [18]and of short periods. If a passer-by does not see an immediate benefit that they can gainfrom engaging with the displaythey will quickly decide to move on. This effect may also lead to passers-by appropriating the interactive display for other purposes than what it was intended for, such as engaging in game play [19].
Interactive displays inpublic spaces may need to
cater for multi-user interaction. This further includes theneed for essential informationsuch as service departure times or general wayfinding information to remain visible at all times, even when someone is interacting with the display. The design of the interactive display needs to take
into account the physical context. In that regard, the design of an interactive display in a busy city centre at a major transport hub is likely to be
vastly different from an interactive display designed for a suburban location.
The research discussed in this paper seeks to explore these considerations and challenges with particular attention to community engagement. The research team aimed to reach a broader cross-section of the public using a large urban screen made available through Sydney- based research partners Willoughby City Council and Urban Screen Productions. The urban screen functioned as a digital platform enabling the researchers to augment it with a range of tools specifically developed for the project in the form of touch screen and full-body gestural interfaces.
III. URBAN MEDIA ENVIRONMENTS
Tscherteu and Tomitsch [10]define urban screens as forms of media artefact existing within the ‘urban media environment’. Urban media environments reflect the influence such artefacts bring to public space and its attendant cultural context. The ubiquity of personal devices such as mobile phones and tablets that may be integrated into the media environment means they too become elements in a confluence of tangible elements in the built environment such as buildings, cars, streetlights,
and street furniture. Each possesses affordances encouraging users to engage with them in different ways according to need or purpose. Urban media environments contribute to the growing complexity and importance of place within a matrix of interdependency comprised of humans, diverse artefacts, and the ever-changing temporal interactive relationships they generate. This understanding of public space posits that urban media environments equate to ‘cultural spaces’ where culture is derived from historical understandings about how cities and their denizens in all their complexity have evolved [10].
It is important to note that although these urban media ecologies have significant impact on determining modes of interaction in an urban space they emerge as a result of the socio-cultural histories of place. Department stores or shopping malls are built at a specific location in an evolving response to long traditions of trading in a precinct. The installation of traffic lights is commonlythe consequence of accidents that happened in comparable urban situations. Similarly the installation of urban screens at a specific location is oftendetermined by the location’s character, for example using an opportunity where traffic slows down allowing drivers to watch the content of the screen. Urban media environments tend to representa complex network of artefacts and interactions happening in a specific site in ways that also
accommodate the history of the site. This highlights that objects in the built environment do not exist as individual components but are part of a co-evolving web of artefacts and interactions happening on a daily basis in the lives of citizens. These artefacts and interactions perpetually and reactively produce new generations of artefacts and interactions. In that sense, urban media environments can be considered to be ‘cultural spaces’ [10]. ‘Culture’ here refers to the historical (or evolutionary) dimension of
urban lifethatis composed of the inhabitants and their behaviours, buildings, technical developments, as well as
reflections oftheoretical and political concepts that form urban life and its development over time. When designing in the context of urban media environments it
is more effective therefore to adopt a strategy that reflects
a broader cultural perspective rather than focusing on the design of individual artefacts or a set of interactions.
In developing appropriate design strategies for urban media environments Tscherteu and Tomitsch [10] propose the following steps towards implementing a successful long-term strategy for designing urban media environments:
It is necessary to understand public space as an environment that consists of (media) artefacts and social interaction. Interactions can be as simple as crossing a square, taking the dog out, or stopping at a traffic light. They can be of ephemeral and invisible nature, or involve visibleartefacts, such as cars, traffic lights, buildings and large displays. Artefacts and interaction constitute each other. Specific environments invite people to behave in specific ways: A park entices people to walk slower compared to a noisy and busy street. There are different modes of perception when driving a car versus walking down an alley. When additional artefacts, such as large screens, are introduced to an urban environment, it is necessary to understand how they influence the holistic system, for instance by comparing the behaviour of city dwellers before and after a media intervention.
The introduction of new media artefacts into an existing environment often creates a cultural conflict due to the fact that the display and/or content were produced in another environment. Content displayed on urban screens is often targeted at a mode of perception that belongs to a different cultural environment such as watching TV at home. It is necessary to understand the cultural shift between environments by analysing the target space and developing an appropriate form of perception.
The introduction of media interventions in public space requires several design and feedback cycles as well as a long-term perspective. To consider the long-term impact of large-scale displays and other media interventions on urban lifealso poses a challenge for city governance, planning and administration.
Drawing on these strategies the design, development, and deployment of the digital applications in this research emphasized consideration ofthe diverse range of people passing through and using the public space around the Chatswood urban screen. The studies were conducted at different times of the day, week and year (e.g. weekdays at lunchtime to reach local office workers, ona Saturday during Chinese New Year). In investigating how digital screens contribute to placemaking as artefacts in a broader media ecology, as well as how they might function as a communication channel for citizens to have a say in placemaking strategies, the studies expand on
prior research examining the socio-cultural role of urban media. It should be noted that this is not in itself an entirely novel concept but emerges from the “city hacking” ethos born out of the global movement towards bottom-up activism supported by digital technology. Similarly, the studies described in this paper have also been discussed by the authors in greater length elsewhere [9].
The studies were run in a public space known locally as The Concourse. The area features a large LED urban screen, a plaza with a municipal library, restaurants, and a concert hall. The screen usually broadcasts movies, documentaries and cartoons and is sometimes used in local events and festivals as an information conduit. The space is dominated by agrassed area, often occupied by children playing, groups having picnics and workers from the nearby offices relaxing during their lunch break. Pedestrians normally walk along the pathways around that area, alongside the restaurants, on one side, and the
cultural venues (library, gallery, concert hall) on the other. In close proximity are a large railway station, several shopping malls and a pedestrian retail precinct all of which ensures a consistently high level of visitors to the plaza area.
The local community is culturally diverse but the demographic of people in the space varies according to the days of the week and times of day. Mornings on workdays tend to reveal a prevalence of mothers taking their toddlers to watch the cartoons on the screen and play in the grassed area, while around lunchtimes office
workers occupy the space and later in the afternoon, students become noticeable in larger numbers. The public is even more mixed on weekends but also less numerous. Gatheringdata by timingthe field studies to
be run at different times and days during the week ensured representation from a cross section of the local community.
IV. ‘VOTE AS YOU GO’ POLLING INTERFACES The research team initially consideredthe potential of
participation and interaction withthe‘Vote As You Go’ polling system against a range of factors including (a) feedback about the interactivity and affordances of the environment; (b) awareness about the interaction by previous participants; (c) playfulness of the interface and; (d) participation as performance (i.e. visibility of individual actions by the surrounding public). Two
separate approaches to interfaces were trialed.
The first interface was a web-based survey designed to run on an iPad Air 9.7 inch deployed on a custom stand. The survey used a polar question format posing a series of yes/no questionsabout community involvement in local events provided by council. These were
displayed in sequential but random order. As questions
were answered the iPad briefly displayed a visualisation of the results accumulated to date after which the next question was displayed. After all questions were posed a new random sequence of questions began.
A second interface was developed as a full-body voting application designed to run on the urban screen