Screens in the Wild

2009

This paper discusses the ongoing design and use of a digital community noticeboard situated in a suburban hub. The design intention is to engage residents, collect and display local information and communications, and spark discussion. A key contribution is an understanding of Situated Display navigation that aids retrieval from a long-term collection created by and for suburban community, and engaging qualities of this collection.

2009

We explore shared encounters mediated by technologies. We investigate aspects that influence the interactions between people and people, and people and their surroundings when technology (a responsive digital screen) is embedded in the physical surroundings in selected locations in the city. In particular, we highlight the importance of space and the role of place in providing temporal and spatial mechanisms facilitating various social interactions and shared encounters. A prototype was implemented as a portable digital screen that can be embedded as an interactive installation in different locations in the city of Bath . It is made of two layers. The first layer is a grid of LEDs (light-emitting diodes) embedded in a surface (1.8mX2.8m) that contains 21 units of rubber door mats. The second layer is a grid of pressure pad sensors, which is located under the LEDs layer. Both the LED and the pressure pad layers form a unit that sends the user's input to the computational program and performs the outputs as well, in the form of blinking LEDs. The pressure pads detect people walking on top of the surface. In response, it illuminates the series of LEDs. The lights turn on or off depending on a computer program, which defines the behavior of each light at every instant. When pedestrians walk over the surface a pattern of blinking lights is generated dynamically following the pedestrians' movement over the surface. The aim is to generate a rich urban experience that can be introduced in various locations in the city. Using the body as an interaface, the digital screen acts as a non-traditional interface and as a facilitator between people and people, and people and their surrounding environment.

This paper explores the placement of an exemplar digitally connected urban screen, installed in the real world. It describes on-going work of implementation and evaluation of networked interactive screens in Urban Space. Our approach is inherently cross-disciplinary bringing together methods from Architecture, and Interaction Design to integrate placement, local interactivity and distributed connectivity of four screen nodes connecting Nottingham with London.

125-239 in Dominique Chateau, José Moure (eds.), Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship - A Historical and Theoretical Reassessment., 2016

In this essay I consider urban screens as mobile media architecture. Digital screens installed in the city, often in conjunction with location-based and mobile media technologies, provide interfaces that intervene temporarily, yet fundamentally, in the built environment. I take as my theoretical objects two urban screens that, while demonstrating the architectural principles of screen-based dispositifs, simultaneously challenge conventional ideas of architecture as fixed, stable, and permanent. They are a " selfie pillar " as an example of screen-based contemporary urban advertising and narrowcasting, and the public art project The Bridge, designed for a large, traveling urban screen. These very different examples of urban screens both construct temporary and mobile architectures for spatial extension and connectivity. In so doing, they demonstrate a combination of architectural and cartographic logic. This twin logic is inherent in the intersection of spatial design (architecture) and mobile and location-based technologies that offer tools for spatial orientation (cartography). As mobile architecture these urban screens demonstrate how our current visual regime of navigation functions .

2011

Framed digital displays will soon give way to walls and facades that creatively motivate individual and group interaction. A stage serves as an apt metaphor to explore the ways in which these ubiquitous screens can transform passive viewing into an involved performance.

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Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2009

There is a tautological tendency in the widespread claims that urban space is ’mediated’. Never before has the citizen, it is argued, been confronted with such an unprecedented array of signage. I depart from the rhetoric of ’biggest-ever-saturation’ as not necessarily untrue, but as insufficient in exploring the diverse spatial operations of urban screens. I examine some contemporary cases of animated architectural surfaces, informational panels, and advertising billboards, with reference to much longer standing cultural practices of spatial management in modern cities, such as illumination, to suggest that the contemporary display media do not mediate the city anew but re-invent urban space as a field of ubiquitous mediation. From that standpoint I suggest exploring urban screens as a) both singular visual agents and indivisible items in plural structural assemblages, b) complementary forces of public illumination, and c) complex perceptual platforms in visual play of scale and di...

New media urban screens are found in many city spaces. This public image today has replaced the former public spaces where social communication used to take place. This paper attempts to reveal the relationship between people and urban screen in an urban space. It is expected that this relationship can be used as a design criteria for urban design. Research has been done using observational methods with video cameras and interviews with selected respondents. The findings obtained from the study show that pedestrian respondents are strongly influenced by the urban screen displays for a variety of reasons.

2015

For over a decade, human-computer interaction (HCI) research placed a great deal of emphasis on studying interaction, engagement, and appropriative practices in online technology-mediated social environments. Moving forward, however, we see computing systems increasingly designed to support digitally-augmented face-to-face interactions in public settings. As far back as the nineteen seventies, new media artists anticipated this interactive potential of digital public displays to foster new forms of situated interactions in urban space, quite distinct from mobile computing in that they altogether exclude online connections or exchanges. Drawing on examples of practice, this paper discusses and showcases some of the key creative strategies, which panelists deploy in order to remediate interactive screen technology into a platform that has the power to disrupt the ordinary course of our everyday experience within increasingly media saturated cities.

2022

inaugural lecture spoken on September 23, 2022 Screens on (the) Streets We encounter more and more screens and other media on the street. They address us and reflect on urban, public space and our position within it. Verhoeff introduces a conceptual framework that provides insight into how screens as media architecture both shape and set public space in motion. It also helps us to see and understand how screens as interfaces create relationships between the city and its inhabitants or visitors, and between those people themselves. By considering screens as media architectures and interfaces, we can gain insights into how they can play a productive role in processes of change within our society. Media for the open city What can screen media do for the open city? According to Verhoeff, the 'open city' is first and foremost an inclusive city that moves with, and responds to, the developments in the world. The open city is also a city full of contradictions that are part of processes of change. Screen media can both make an important contribution to the public debate about these difficult, sometimes painful processes, and help develop proposals for an inclusive city.

2008

Urban space, digital platform, shared encounter.

2009

International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction, 2009

Public displays and mobile phones are ubiquitous technologies that are already weaving themselves into the everyday life of urban citizens. The combination of the two enables new and novel possibilities, such as interaction with displays that are not physically accessible, extending screen real estate for mobile phones or transferring user content to and from public displays. However, current usability evaluations of prototype systems have explored only a small part of this design space, as usage of such systems is deeply embedded in and dependent on social and everyday context. In order to investigate issues surrounding appropriation and real use in social context field studies are necessary. In this paper we present our experiences with field deployments in a continuum between exploratory prototypes and technology probes. We present benefits and drawbacks of different evaluation methods, and provide a number of validated lessons from our deployments.

Proceeding of the …, 2008