Public interactive displays (PID) are a promising technology for providing information and collecting feedback in public spaces. Research on PIDs has shown that, like all public displays, their efficacy is reduced by display blindness. Rather than increase the visual attention-grabbing nature of PIDs, we propose that additional understanding is required around how and when these displays are able to offer value to users. We tackle this through a systematic analysis of PID studies published in the literature, which led to 9 aspects of value across 4 factors: people, location, community, and time. We discuss the identified aspects and their utility for the design of PIDs through a review of our own deployments carried out by 4 different labs across 5 countries. We conclude with a set of recommendations for identifying and optimising the intended value of future PIDs.

We present the design and evaluation of MyPosition, a public display in the form of a large projection, featuring an interactive poll visualization. MyPosition aims at facilitating the deliberation and comparison of individual opinions on locally relevant topics in an opportunistic and engaging way. We evaluated MyPosition in an in-the-wild study and demonstrated that the engaging nature of the installation was effective in enticing public discussion. We found that (i) the increased identifiability of users positively impacted the engagement with and the social debate around the installation, however lowered the actual polling rate; (ii) people submitted their personal opinion instead of playing around with the interactive features; and (iii) the display led to considerable discussion as well as nudging among people, in particular in zones beyond the interaction area in front of the screen.

Most of today's public displays only show predefined contents that passers-by are not able to change. We argue that interactive public displays would benefit from immediately usable mid-air techniques for choosing options, expressing opinions or more generally selecting one among several items. We propose a design space for hand-gesture based mid-air selection techniques on interactive public displays, along with four specific techniques that we evaluated at three different locations in the the field. Our findings include: 1) if no hint is provided, people successfully use Point+Dwell for selecting items, 2) the user representation could be switched from Mirror to Cursor after registration without causing confusion, 3) people tend to explore items before confirming one, 4) in a public context, people frequently interact inadvertently (without looking at the screen). We conclude by providing recommendations for designers of interactive public displays to support immediate usability for mid-air selection.

Public displays and projections are becoming increasingly available in various informal urban settings. However, their potential impact on informing and engaging citizens on relevant issues has still been largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that visualizations displayed in public settings are able to increase social awareness and discourse by exposing underlying patterns in data that is submitted by citizens. We thus introduce the design and evaluation of Reveal-it!, a public, interactive projection that facilitates the comparison of the energy consumptions of individuals and communities. Our in-the-wild deployment in three distinct physical locations provided insights into: 1) how people responded to this form of display in different contexts; 2) how it influenced people's perception and discussion of individual and communal data; and 3) the implications for a public visualization as a tool for increasing awareness and discourse. We conclude by discussing emerging participant behaviors, as well as some challenges involved in facilitating a socially motivated crowd-sourced visualization in the public context.

This paper presents an interactive installation for a public space aimed at motivating new behaviors by augmenting the space with subtle and playful audiovisual interaction aesthetically integrated in a shared environment. Designed to complement an existing water fountain with projected light and sound, the embedded installation encouraged people to take a drink, increasing the proportion of people who used the water fountain by 42% to 57% approximately for nine months. Sensors evaluated the impact of multiple interaction modalities on actual water usage. We found that subtle interaction can improve the experience of a space, in particular for those that use it frequently, and lead to sustained behavior change, especially when its modalities are responsive to the level of activity in the space.

Nowadays professional journalists create and edit broadcasting materials inside newsrooms that are characterized by an intense and multivariate flux of information. Within these settings, the journalists have difficulties keeping up with the evolving geopolitical picture of events developing in the world and how it relates to the topics of their interest. In this paper we present AmbientNEWS, an ambient display that visualizes dynamic news content and informs professional journalists on the global picture of events. We argue that the conceptualization and design of its information aesthetics criteria can be grounded in user requirements, and subsequently engaged to augment the awareness of professionals in an environment that is highly crowded with information. We also discuss the evaluation process of ambient information visualization with a focus on aesthetic design aspects. We conclude by summarizing our findings and discuss future work.