Pers Ubiquit Comput DOI 10.1007/s00779-014-0765-4

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Understanding the effects of contextual constraints on performative behaviour in interactive media installations Luke Hespanhol • Martin Tomitsch

Received: 22 May 2013 / Accepted: 29 October 2013  Springer-Verlag London 2014

Abstract In this article, we describe three interactive media installations, each evaluated in a distinctive environment. By following a research in and through design approach and studying the installations in public settings, we were able to identify an effect of contextual constraints— such as location, prominence of spectacle, length of interaction and spatial distribution of focal points—on the types of interactions encouraged through the installations. More specifically, we were able to formulate distinct content strategies for individual and group interactions while observing specific design parameters conducive to performative behaviour. We associate such parameters to three different categories of interaction with public media installations: performative interaction, ubiquitous interaction and a third hybrid scenario falling between those two, immersive interactions. We then present a framework for assessment of public interactive installations and key aspects to be considered when designing proactive contextual interventions in the public realm. Finally, we discuss how such aspects point to further investigation on formal principles underlying interactive experiences designed to facilitate specific levels of performance and spectacle.

1 Introduction To state that electronic displays have become ubiquitous is now commonplace. Increasingly affordable and available L. Hespanhol (&)
M. Tomitsch Design Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Tomitsch e-mail: [email protected]

in a wide range of models, they have swiftly gone far beyond their immediate purpose of displaying digital information, making their way into media walls [22, 34] and artistic installations [13, 24]. Likewise, tracking technologies have also reached a level of maturity that enables both fast integration into legacy applications and rapid prototyping of new automated systems responding to environmental variables. Increasing automation of the public domain through highly available computing platforms has enabled the design of pervasive interactive environments, mediating the exchange of information between people and their surroundings seamlessly and in real time. This emerging technological landscape offers unprecedented opportunities for the design of interventions in private and public spaces that can somehow perceive the dynamics of its population and respond to it meaningfully (i.e. in accordance with the expectations of such local audience). For example, an electronic system designed for public space has the potential to identify changes in the way people go through the space—such as variations in the number of people in the site during different times of the day, their spatial distribution, the length of time they spend in the area and so on. For each of those different conditions, the system could therefore behave in a different manner, tailoring its content and interactive propositions to better suit the distinct audiences it is presented with. That would, effectively, change the nature of the public space, reshaping it on demand to address different, dynamic purposes, with implications not only for architecture and urban planning [34], but also crowd dynamics [29, 32], behavioural sciences [8, 24] and, naturally, human–computer interaction [12, 13]. People’s behaviour towards each other and the environment seem to be strongly influenced by design factors

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such as spatial distribution of interactive zones, level of integration of devices into the physical buildings and the nature of the content displayed at different times and for different audiences [3, 4]. For the purposes of the present research, we use the term focal points to denote areas of the technology embedded into the built environment that are eye-catching, having a higher likelihood to grab people’s focused visual attention [14]. Although not necessarily the case, those are often spots where dynamic content is displayed and, consequently, where direct participation [4] generally takes place. Behavioural patterns can also be intentionally suggested to the passers-by so that continuous levels of emotional response, engagement and social integration are achieved through technology [20, 25]. It can therefore be argued that the design of ‘‘smart environments’’ can potentially leverage the traditional architectural practices through the introduction of methods and techniques borrowed from software engineering, interface design, game design and electronic art practices for the creation of social or personal experiences highly integrated to the particular urban site they are introduced at. Glimpses of such realities are already being offered mainly through art installations [23, 31] and interactive advertising [2] in the public space. It is our belief that responsive environments [22]—currently based on tracking devices such as depth-sensing cameras and infrared sensors—should supplement the pervasive status acquired by public displays and eventually also become more ubiquitous. Localised mediation of the different ways people engage in social encounters at an urban scale may then lead to the consolidation of best practices for the design of physical spaces which people can not only go through or live at but also talk to, get responses from and reach other people through. Social interaction [24] can be fostered at different levels, ranging from individual (when focus is diffused and each person goes about their own business) to collective (when a group of people is united by a shared extrinsic goal). Enhancing the overall experience of people as they move around public and private spaces while also bringing them together into a continuous social dialogue is what has been referred to in the literature as designing for an urban user interface [35]. The objective of our research is to unveil the potential for maximising the collective interactive experience [28] through the thoughtful utilisation of public displays and tracking technologies. Building on the presented body of work, we envisage the research to offer a relevant contribution to the ongoing analysis with a consideration of contextual aspects on the design of collective participation in the public space. In this article, we present observations derived from three field studies we conducted in the form of public, artistic installations. In each study, we intended to

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encourage specific patterns of audience participation by carefully adjusting a range of design parameters that we identified in the early phases of the design process, based on given constraints and a review of relevant literature in this space. In the following sections, we first discuss the related work, different types of interaction in the public space and the methodological approach adopted for the research. We then go through the details of each installation, explaining the context existing at the time of their conception and how such contextual constraints raised specific design concerns. Next, we present the results of each field study and discuss the interaction goals adopted in each scenario, as well as the design decisions taken in response to the given context and established interaction goals. Along the process, we apply and refine a framework for assessment of public interactive installations (based on our earlier research [11]) and present parameters to be considered when designing proactive contextual interventions in the public space. We categorise the works in regard to their performative, immersive and ubiquitous aspects and relate such classification to design solutions adopted to deal with specific contextual constraints. We then conclude by comparing and contrasting the design strategies and discussing the implications of the research findings. The first two field studies presented in this article— Liquid Light and Chromapollination—as well as the associated analysis and findings have also been discussed at greater length elsewhere [11, 13]. This article builds on that analysis and expands it further through an investigation of immersive interactions.

2 Background 2.1 Related work The situated utilisation of interactive technologies and the participatory dynamics of responsive environments represent a relatively new research area. The basic interaction design principles underpinning the present research have mostly been outlined in the past decade, building on initial studies conducted the decade before. Brignull and Rogers’s seminal behavioural analysis on audience interaction with public displays [4] introduced the concepts of ‘‘activity spaces’’—periphery awareness, focal awareness and direct interaction activities—as well as particular crowd dynamics around public displays, such as the honey-pot effect. The concept of spatial crowd interaction was gaining momentum since the late 1990s, when Ishii and Ulmer [15] identified a significant trend of positioning the design of interactive systems away from traditional graphical user interfaces and towards pervasive tangible experiences. Through their research on tangible interactions, they

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proposed that interaction with digital interfaces would become haptic and more intuitive compared with traditional graphical user interfaces. Exploring the subtle and often unconscious impact of proxemics [9] on people’s behaviour has been a perennial concern in human–computer interaction research, sparking exploration in different and often unusual directions. Bho¨mer et al. [33], for instance, analysed the social dynamics of family and friends having dinner together by introducing a new photo device, 4Photos. The device had been designed to be a centrepiece for a dinner table and cued the guests into conversation topics by presenting them with seemingly random imagery. Through careful medium placement and content programming—core design concerns shared with our own research—4Photos managed to bring people together in a social context around a digital display, thus serving as a highly relevant example of effective use of design attributes for initiate and subsequently tune collective participation around media displays. Bedwell and Caruana [3] carried out further investigation on the challenge of inciting spectacle for self-sustaining interactive experiences around public displays. Their analysis suggested that spreading relevant content across the interactive space invites the audience to more thoroughly explore the overall environment and, consequently, through multiple cycles of appreciation, to better understand it. Their study also revealed that participation could be encouraged by allowing spectators to observe non-experts performing. As we will describe in the following sections, such design strategies are characterised, in our research, as ubiquitous and performative interactions, respectively. Likewise, our research indicates that contextual constraints are expressed not only in terms of spatial layout of the public space and the nature of its population, but often in terms of the site’s affordances to artistic interventions capable of reflecting, articulating and enhancing its cultural identity. Vande Moere and Woulters [34] analysed geographic and social aspects related to the integration of media displays with their surroundings. Discussing case studies where lack of a design agenda led to poor utilisation of the technology in the public architecture, they reflected on the intricate relationship between the various stakeholders with decision power over its utilisation—such as the carrier (the building where the media is installed at), the content (the physical display as well as the message it conveys) and the dynamic urban environment around the media display. Through the analysis of a series of interactive installations employing mixed reality, Jacucci et al. [16] identified different approaches and strategies in using ubiquitous

computing to achieve participation in interactive works, including enabling authorship; affording connectivity; interacting with artificial beings; reinterpreting the visitor world; engaging in performative acts; use of space; and playing with materiality. We will be referring to such strategies later in the paper when discussing our own installations and highlighting the strategies that appeared more applicable to ubiquitous, immersive or performative interaction settings. 2.2 Performative interactions Performative interactions [11] occur in scenarios when the ubiquitous media presents people with a story and encourages them to engage in role-playing and adopting the media as a ‘‘prop’’ for bodily expressions [16, 17, 19]. In that sense, ‘‘interaction as performance’’ enables a feedback loop that ‘‘implies at the same time experience and expression, action and representation, consciousness of the act, and, like an event, an initiation and consummation’’ [19]. Performative interactions are driven by the interactive installation and designed with the objective of bringing a community together through playful experiences. Such interactions allow members of the public to step out of their usual circumstances and, grabbing the attention of their peers, to be socially rewarded by this action. Performative interactions therefore become a representation of the notion of public space as stage for social actors as originally proposed by Goffman [7]: people respond to the interactive media by voluntarily assuming temporary roles for themselves as well as communicating and negotiating these roles with others around them, who either become audience to the performers or join themselves the performance by engaging in collective social expression. 2.3 Immersive environments Jacucci [18] presents immersiveness as a core feature characterising performative uses of mixed media spaces, enabling participants to enact a scene in a life size environment and with a high level of realism. Immersiveness therefore relates to the relative scale of the body within the responsive environment and the consequent affordances for embodied interactions with the digitally augmented architecture that are perceived by the participants as being highly comparable to interactions with non-digital spaces or entities. For the purposes of the present study, we extend Jacucci’s definition of immersiveness as the quality of an interactive setting that not only enables embodied interaction but is also physically enclosed, promotes sensorial immersion [26] and conduces to flow [5].

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2.4 Ubiquitous interactions In ubiquitous interactions [11] people’s attention is centred on the environment itself as opposed to audience members acting as performers. In such settings, not only the technology is ubiquitous—i.e. highly integrated into the built environment—but also the participation is continuous and spreads out across it. Responsive technology [22] enables people going through such spaces to establish a seamless process of playful communication with their surroundings. Technology is built into the environment and participants interact with responsive architectural features [23, 31]. Ubiquitous interactions enrich ordinary experiences by digitally augmenting familiar items within the built environment. They act as facilitators for serendipitous collective experiences and catalysts for deeper and less explicit connections between people and their surroundings [11].

highly performative to highly ubiquitous. The specific nature of the installations ranges from feature specific (very clear functional outcome expected from the interaction) to ambient (no specific functional outcome; higher emphasis on the mood conveyed and how it can potentially work as a catalyst to further social interactions). This approach enables us to investigate the effects of different contextual constraints on performative behaviour and tune them accordingly to encourage specific behavioural patterns. We first present two installations designed for open public spaces where pre-existing contextual constraints determined extreme opposite scenarios for audience participation: the first predominantly performative; the second, ubiquitous. We then contrast those scenarios with a third field study of an interactive installation where we proactively varied some of the contextual constraints observed in the previous two settings to design a more intimate responsive environment.

3 Methodology 4 The installations For the implementation and analysis of the studies described in this article, we followed a research in and through design approach [6, 36], which involved executing iterations of design work whose outcomes not only produce new knowledge about the field of study but also inform the design process itself, paving the way for further studies. Each iteration fed back into the process of posing new research questions and unveiling new evidence. The design of each iteration took into account both the results of and the insights gained from the previous studies into its design. The creation of installations for studying the dynamics of public participation is necessarily experimental. As pointed out by Alt et al. [1] in their analysis on methods for evaluation of public displays, ‘‘there are aspects, such as effectiveness, social effects, audience behaviour and privacy implications that are almost impossible to measure in the laboratory’’. In order to gain insights into the relevant design parameters while still ensuring a high ecologic validity for the data, we decided to carry out a series of field studies, each aiming to explore different research conditions. The outcomes of each cycle were then collated, analysed and fed back into the design process of the next study, therefore generating, overtime, an increasingly solid body of evidence to support the overall findings. The studies described in this article represent the first iterations of a broader research on responsive environments. The research is structured so that each cycle involves the design and implementation of an interactive installation posing different interactive scenarios. The scenarios are chosen to range from situated (site specific) to generic (site agnostic), individual to collective and

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In order to analyse the effects of contextual constraints on performative behaviour, we selected three of our works with strikingly different characteristics in terms of their scale, placement, openness of the public space and the general contextual constraints associated with each of them. All works were developed at the University of Sydney in collaboration with other students and researchers. Liquid Light and Chromapollination were implemented over the course of 4 and 6 months, respectively, and deployed 1 year apart, although both under similar conditions (outdoor public environments in winter nights). Metastasis was conceived as a responsive room for an indoor gallery exhibition. As discussed in greater detail in the following sections, the rationale for such selection stems from our perception that each of the three works epitomises a very distinct interaction model. Considering the modes of interaction defined above, Liquid Light can be seen as an example of largely performative interaction, while the interactive dynamics afforded by Chromapollination are largely ubiquitous. Metastasis, on the other hand, borrows design aspects from both, suggesting that some of the same contextual constraints found in open public spaces can be reframed to the creation of more intimate, immersive interactive environments. 4.1 Liquid Light Liquid Light was designed as part of an electronic art exhibition night. The event consisted of about 10 light installations running sequentially on a large LED screen

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Fig. 1 Performers and spectators interacting with Liquid Light during an electronic art exhibition night

Fig. 3 Liquid Light adapted for a conference environment

addressing audiences with meaningful content; 2) the ability to re-exhibit the work in multiple contexts (such as symposiums and conferences, as illustrated in Fig. 3). Positioning the water mist at the back of the interaction zone was an attempt of achieving the former through elastic design [13]. 4.2 Chromapollination Fig. 2 Liquid Light’s original set-up

installed in a public space, each one given a slot of 15 min to be presented. Conceptually, the work aimed to address the decline in face-to-face social interactions paradoxically on the rise as modern society gets increasingly connected through technology [21]. The ubiquity of mobile technology, social networks and online services—albeit bringing us together in a continuous flux of social dialogue—often also isolates us from people in our immediate physical surroundings. For that purpose, we used a depth camera to capture the audience in front of the screen and displayed their silhouette as glowing auras gliding on dark water. As soon as more people stepped into the scene, all their auras got connected through the representation of their heads on the screen by shining halos that stayed on for as much time as people’s auras stayed visible on the screen (Fig. 1). At the back of the interaction zone, we installed a water mister (Fig. 2) that switched on once the amount of people interacting with the screen reached a certain threshold [13]. The design of Liquid Light was founded on two chief concerns: 1) enabling the installation to continuously adapt its interactive mode for different crowd sizes, suitably

Chromapollination was a site-specific artistic installation commissioned to feature at the 2012 edition of Vivid Sydney, a large festival hosted annually during winter nights in Sydney, Australia. One of the festival’s hallmarks is an array of light installations spread along a large area of the Sydney Harbour’s foreshore and on every night over a period of 18 days. Most of the installations showcased in the festival consist of situated artworks that make innovative use of lighting and interactive technology. The 2012 edition of Vivid is estimated to have attracted more than half a million visitors overall. For our research, the festival provided an ideal testing environment, as the works were installed within the public sphere and viewed by people on their daily commute from or to work as well as visitors who came into the area particularly for the event. We installed Chromapollination under a large elevated expressway running above Circular Quay station, the city’s busiest transport hub—an interchange equipped with bus and ferry terminals connected through a rail station serving thousands of commuters every single day. The area under the expressway lacks any remarkable architectural features and works mainly as a thoroughfare for people coming to and from the public transport terminal. Consequently, during the period Vivid Sydney is on, it functions as de facto gateway to the festival (Fig. 4, left). When discussing the work with the festival organisers, our team was briefed

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Pers Ubiquit Comput Fig. 4 People walking past Chromapollination towards the train station (left) and light pollen effect travelling across the overhead LED ceiling (right)

about the site and requested to create a piece that was highly attractive and engaging yet created as little impact as possible to the local flow of people. From a conceptual viewpoint, we designed Chromapollination as a statement about turning a neglected urban space into a gathering place where social interaction could unfold. To achieve that, we conceived a sculpture consisting of three garden pods delimiting an enclosed area people could walk through. At each garden pod, sculptures of giant dandelion flowers embedded with fibre optics glowed with different colours. Hanging above the structure, a pixel net ceiling made of around 2,000 individually controlled LEDs was arranged tri-dimensionally and displayed dynamic light patterns. People’s motion around and across the installation created a ‘‘digital wind’’, blowing the dandelion flowers and causing them to release ‘‘light pollen’’—represented as a stream of light holding the same colour as the originating flower, animated on the overhead LED ceiling (Fig. 4, right). As such ‘‘light seeds’’ reached neighbouring dandelions those were ‘‘pollinated’’ and changed to a new colour resulted of mixing their own colour with the colour of the light seeds. Adopting the evaluation framework proposed by Alt et al. [1] as a guideline (for the reasons exposed in the Sect. 3 above), our main research questions regarded audience behaviour display effectiveness and social impact. The actual methods chosen for interpretation of the interactive aspects of the work were determined predominantly by its scope. Video recording and direct interviews were avoided, given the privacy and ethical concerns raised by its public nature. Instead, we favoured on-site observations of the crowd dynamics. Detailed results from such observations can be found in the academic paper we published at the time [11]. 4.3 Metastasis Metastasis was the outcome of a collaborative research project between the Design Lab and architecture

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researchers at the University of Sydney. The work was commissioned to feature at the Digital Interdisciplinations exhibition, part of the inaugural Biome Symposium, which took place at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, in August 2012. The exhibition remained open at the Tin Sheds Gallery, in the same Faculty, for about 20 days. The work was conceived as a natural progression of previous research experiments from both sides. As an architecture project, it represented revisiting a video wall artwork depicting harmonious and aesthetically pleasant self-generative structures created from cellular growth simulation algorithms and making it responsive to the audience’s input. From the Design Lab viewpoint, it was an opportunity to take screen-based interactive installations such as Liquid Light a step further by expanding it out of the electronic display into the broader architectural environment towards a more ubiquitous setting such as Chromapollination. Metastasis was conceived as a dark room inhabited by a parasitical organism embedded into the gallery building. The organism consisted of videos displaying cells in continuous reproduction, expanding out of three large LED screens into projections on the surrounding walls of the room (Fig. 5). Such metastatic pattern stood as an image for indiscriminate energy consumption, a social behaviour born out of bad habits and comfort needs. Using the metaphor of a cancer, we attempted to express the fact that indiscriminate energy consumption—albeit comfortable, pleasant and a sign of progress at an individual level—will, if unbounded, easily lead to the collapse of society due to the unsustainable exploitation and eventual exhaustion of natural resources. Each individual, by trying ‘‘to live’’ too much, ends up contributing to the demise of the whole social organism. As people entered the room where Metastasis was exhibited, their presence was detected and the organism started to be healed: the videos played backwards, with the projections receding back to the LED screens, therefore

Pers Ubiquit Comput Table 1 Contextual constraints

Fig. 5 Metastasis fully lit up when no one was detected in its vicinity. Photo courtesy of A. Baki Kocaballi

showing the cancerous cells progressively dying (Fig. 6, left). Once the projections were gone, the cells in the screens also began to disappear, until the whole room felt into darkness (Fig. 6, right). At that stage, only the outlines of the participants’ silhouettes could be seen, displayed from different angles as if the surrounding screens were electronic mirrors. A droning soundtrack was also played forward or backward to match the projections, going silent otherwise. Responsiveness was conveyed, therefore, in two levels: (1) immediate feedback of the users silhouettes on the electronic screens; (2) a more ambient audio-visual response from the surrounding environment, changing as an acknowledgement to the presence or absence of people within it.

5 Design motivations Three basic constraints influenced the nature of each installation (Table 1). The first constraint is defined by the prominence of each piece within its exhibition context. Chromapollination, being part of Vivid Sydney, was exhibited amongst an array of other light installations; likewise, Metastasis was one among various other works in

Constraint

Liquid light

Metastasis

Chromapollination

Prominence

Exhibited in isolation

Exhibited in conjunction with other works

Exhibited in conjunction with other works

Duration of exhibition

15 min

20 days, 8 h per day

18 nights, 6 h per night

Audience flow

Restrictive

Restrictive

Permissive

its gallery exhibition. Liquid Light, on the other hand, while also part of an exhibition night at the University of Sydney campus, was featured in a specific time slot and, therefore, displayed in isolation. The second constraint refers to the length of time each artwork was actually being exhibited for—while both Chromapollination and Metastasis were open to the public over exhibitions spanning many days, Liquid Light was on for only about 15 min. As a consequence, Liquid Light had full attention of the exhibition visitors for the whole time it was in operation, while Metastasis’ audience was far more spread out during the whole period the exhibition was on. Similarly, the public for Chromapollination—despite being substantially larger—could also plan its visit ahead of time and return multiple occasions if they so wished. The third constraint refers to the level of permission for people to move across the space allowed by each work. Unlike the previous aspects, here Metastasis was much similar to Liquid Light: while with both those works, we sought to attract the audience to the site and encourage them to stay within its boundaries for the whole duration of the show, with Chromapollination our concern was to allow the crowd to move freely, not obstructing the main thoroughfare while still offering people a chance to experience the site in a novel way. Liquid Light required high prominence during a short period of time, in accordance with the pre-defined schedule organised for the group exhibition night. That led to a design solution addressing immediate feedback to the

Fig. 6 A participant starting interaction with Metastasis (left) and the installation after a few minutes of interaction (right). Photos courtesy of A. Baki Kocaballi

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audience via direct interaction with a single focal point, with a stage-like zone naturally emerging in front of the display. Likewise, the audience also self-organised into performers—those mediating the collective experience by overcoming their own personal concerns about public embarrassment—and spectators—those reluctant to cross the threshold from ‘‘focal awareness’’ to ‘‘participation’’, rather passively enjoying the experience by observing the performers on stage. The contextual restrictions for Chromapollination, on the other hand, set the opposite agenda. Creating conditions for collective public performance was clearly not desirable, given that not compromising the flow of people in the area demanded the work to be permeable. A crowd should be given ways of interacting with the space, but also to walk past or through it without necessarily stopping for too long, ensuring a steady flow of visitors. The installation set-up needed to convey such permeable and highly inclusive participation so that the public would not spend too long trying to make sense of the work, which in this context could easily also lead to frustration and a poor user experience. We concluded that mediation of the process should therefore be empathic, with less emphasis on specific performers amongst the members of the audience and more on the environment itself around them. Interaction should be implied through subtle, indirect visual cues around the audience but not necessarily right in front of it. In other words, there should be no particular ‘‘stage’’ zone. Rather, situatedness became a major design concern: the aim was for Chromapollination to aesthetically and functionally blend with the surrounding environment, enriching the site while deviating as little as possible from its usual appearance and affordances. The contextual constraints for both Liquid Light and Chromapollination therefore existed prior to the projects being designed, and the design solutions adopted were responses to such constraints. In Metastasis, on the other hand, we got the opportunity to test the possibility of shaping those constraints in a way we could then promote tailored participation modes. In regard to such interaction goals, Metastasis should sit somewhere in between the fully performative character of Liquid Light and the emphasis on the surrounding environment sought by Chromapollination. While still encouraging some level of performance, the narrative to be told was expected to be of a more intimate nature. The interactive experience would consist in an unfolding dialogue between the installation and the participants: through continuous feedback from all sides, the participants would be led to feel one with the surrounding environment. To enhance this tight integration and sense of ownership towards the space, we devised the access to be partially exclusive: although many people could fit in the room, the space was secluded; and although

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Table 2 Content strategies Design parameter

Liquid light

Metastasis

Chromapollination

Type of interaction

Performative interaction

Immersive interaction

Ubiquitous interaction

Focal point

Stage (the display)

Surrounding

Diffused

Mapping of feedback

Direct, 1–1

Direct, 1 to many

Ambiguous

Medium integration

Low: standalone

Medium: architectural

High: embedded

Tangibility

Extrinsic

Intrinsic

Intrinsic

Situatedness

Weak

Medium

Strong

participants could be heard from other sections of the gallery, they could not bee seen. It is important to point out that such an approach also validates immersive installations as particular cases of both performative and ubiquitous environments where what is varied is the immersiveness of the space (rather than an open public space, it makes use of a enclosed public space). Although in this occasion we had Metastasis installed in a gallery, it would still qualify as an immersive environment even if the enclosed room were installed in the middle of the open urban environment. Setting those participation goals as premises for the design process helped us to better articulate design parameters related to the content we sought to convey with each work (Table 2). For the purposes of the present discussion, we refer to content in the same sense as defined by Vande Moere and Wouters [34], i.e. encompassing both medium (e.g. an LED screen) and message (e.g. the digital content shown on the LED screen). From our observations, it can be argued that the level of physical integration (Fig. 7, right) of the media display to the rest of the work is to a certain extent encouraged by the prominence of each work within its respective exhibitions—the less prominent the work needs to be, the more the display can be integrated as a sculptural element of the installation. Chromapollination had to share the audience’s attention with other installations and being functional for an extended period of time, allowing people to experience a higher level of integration with the surrounding context and a more exploratory and situated interaction, intrinsic to the site [30] (Fig. 7, left). The work could afford the absence of a single focal point—in fact, that enhanced its pervasive nature. That in turn implied that the media displays needed to be highly integrated to the work’s physical structure. Lack of focal points and high tangibility are, in fact, usually intrinsic to interactive ubiquitous environments functioning as ambient media in an augmented space [15]. The ‘‘digital wind’’ metaphor at the core of the Chromapollination

Pers Ubiquit Comput Fig. 7 Chromapollination invited a slow pace interaction (left) with an integrated media display conveying the pollination effect (right)

concept was highly tangible in the sense it mapped a physical action by the passers-by with strong fidelity to its natural equivalent—people are familiar with wind blowing on flowers and helping spread their pollen. Such a correspondence added to the ubiquity of the piece and seamlessly blended it with the physical space, supported by the sculptural elements of the work. Similarly—although to a lesser degree—in Metastasis, we also integrated the digital media into the architecture of the space in order to spread focal points (Table 2). Despite of using electronic displays, we organised them so that they delimited an enclosed space where the interaction could unfold; the whole interaction space became, therefore, the ‘‘stage’’. The performative nature of Liquid Light, in contrast, reduced the use of tangible elements to extrinsic accessories for shifting attention off the content on the display and into the physical space (water mist), thus balancing the interaction flow. Liquid Light was conceived as a stagebased installation and active for just a short period of time. It demanded the utilisation of the display as an unequivocal focal point, akin to a beacon calling the passers-by for attention. Its ‘‘pop-up’’ nature also required it to be easily reconditioned for different sites and physical settings; it favoured, therefore, the utilisation of displays as standalone equipment potentially replaced by similar devices (e.g. projectors) should new logistic conditions favoured so. Our observations indicate that focal point features have also a direct impact on the audience’s expectation of an artwork. Ubiquitous and immersive settings afford diffused focal points. They are expected to be non-obtrusive and often not perceived as being interactive altogether. As verified in Chromapollination, despite the fact levels of participation were high, members of the audience were mostly unaware of such participation, as the feedback given by the installation was not easily perceived as being caused by any specific individual. Electronic displays, on the other hand, bring with them a strong bias towards being the focus of passive collective attention, charged by our cultural experiences with TV and cinema. Studies by Huang et al. [14] indicate that factors such as the nature of content displayed and physical

placement within the environment can strongly affect how eye-catching screens really become within a public setting. For example, placing a screen at eye level and displaying dynamic non-verbal content highly increases the likelihood of people glancing at a display when walking into a space. Moreover, such attractiveness becomes even stronger when the content displayed electronically relates to the physical content surrounding the screen in the particular location it is installed. It is therefore possible to argue that people will generally pay attention to electronic displays that offer extended content about the surrounding environment, a content they will in principle approach passively. Indicating that such single focal point is interactive implies therefore the feedback from the installation to be direct, occurring around the same area where input was received and unambiguously caused by it. Entailed behaviour is often manifested as the honey-pot effect, followed by an interaction process that is at least partially exclusive— some people actively participating, while others are merely observing [4]. In that regard, Metastasis posed us with a design challenge: we decided to investigate the potential of employing electronic displays as architectural features for the creation of spaces which could offer content simultaneously diffused and highly attractive. The main aspects guiding the design of Metastasis related to focus, awareness and aesthetic coherence. From an interactive viewpoint, the installation was conceived to stand somewhere in between the very direct screen feedback characteristic of Liquid Light and the very subtle environmental responsiveness underlying Chromapollination. A combination of both features was therefore explicitly sought, with our research group setting as a core design goal to distribute the focal points naturally created by digital displays across the interactive zone. The intention was to create a hybrid zone where some elements of the environment could respond to the audience’s inputs in a more immediate manner than others, therefore making the work both highly noticeable and responsive (by offering immediate feedback though the participants’ silhouettes [27]) as well as ambient (by evolving the visual patterns depending on the level participation, but with a temporal delay).

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In addition to that, to maximise the feedback to the audience and make their impact onto the work as clear as possible, setting the installation as an immersive and enclosed environment was of high importance. Ideally, the participants should be able to immerse themselves in the experience and try to make sense of it using both their direct and peripheral awareness [4]. Lastly, the aesthetics of the work—and its potential emotional impact on the participants—needed to be coherent with the proposed concept. Striking the right impact in terms of light and sound effects was crucial to sustain the proposed narrative of the experience as a fine balance between light and darkness, sound and silence as metaphors for overconsumption and social responsibility, cancer and healing, life and death. The solution we found to address such concerns was to design the installation as an enclosed square room: a dedicated environment within the gallery space with limited focal points. We decorated three of the four walls with large LED screens and projections while the fourth wall consisted of a black curtain hanging from ceiling to floor. The curtain, while obstructing the view of the screens from outside of the room, allowed the sound to be perceived from there, making the participants aware of what was taking place inside. Cables, computers and speakers were concealed in order to keep the space free of visual clutter, and the only lights in the room came from the screens and projections themselves.

enquiry to evaluate the effectiveness of our design. To that end, we opted for running user test sessions followed by semi-structured interviews. 6.1 Evaluation methodology We scheduled user sessions for Metastasis with 13 participants (9 females, 4 males) over a period of 2 days. Each participant was asked to go inside the gallery to the location where the installation was exhibited and stay there for as long as they wanted. After they left, they were both interviewed and asked to answer a questionnaire ranking the experience across various quality criteria. The sessions were also organised in a way that allowed some of the participants to experience part of their session by themselves and part with another person in the space. To that end, we asked six of the participants to enter the room when it was vacant (therefore fully lit), while five others were requested to step into the room when someone else was already in there. The remaining two participants were allowed to stay the whole time by themselves in the space, without interruption. The interviews were semi-structured, letting the participants talk as much as possible while also guiding them to provide answers to the questions below: • • •

6 Evaluation of design driven by contextual constraints variations Both Liquid Light and Chromapollination were exhibited in open public spaces; great part of their design effort was directed into catering for the audience self-organisation within the space and around the works. Running structured user sessions could, therefore, compromise the ecological validity of the data. That fact prompted us to adopt field observation and data logging as the main strategies for data gathering. Results from those studies—which assisted us to formulate a framework for analysing and informing the design of interactive experiences in the public space—were discussed at length in an academic paper we published at the time [11] and are essentially reflected in the design discussion about the works presented in the previous section. Metastasis, on the other hand, was designed to probe the concept of proactively manipulating contextual constraints in order to create intimate, immersive responsive environments. Given the perceived influence exerted by the immersive nature of an environment on the emotional state of participants, we decided to adopt a qualitative mode of

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How did you feel in the space? Was there anything you particularly liked/disliked about the experience? You may have shared the space with another person. Did you know each other? How well? How would you compare the experience to the one you had when you were by yourself?

The aim of the interview was to gauge the impact the immersive environment might have on people’s emotions and behaviour while also gaining insights on how the interaction between people and the work would unfold within the enclosed space under different social circumstances.

7 Results Most of the participants (7 out of 13) reported that the first thing they consciously attempted to do as soon as they entered the space was trying to make sense of it. Five participants reported their first impression as some kind of delight with the surrounding projections and for seeing their own silhouettes on the screens, and sought firstly to appreciate the work and engage with it in an emotional level rather than necessarily trying to make sense of it. All those participants who reported appreciation as their first move within the space as opposed to sense making had

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started the interaction on their own—i.e. there was nobody in the room when they came inside. Conversely, all the five participants who entered the space to find someone else already playing reported trying to make sense of it as their first concern within the experience. Strikingly, all those five participants failed to make sense of the work even after the other person had left the room. On the other hand, the same feeling of frustration was only reported by one of the participants who came to the space when it was empty. Such frustration derived mainly from the failure in understanding how their actions impacted anything in the work beyond their immediate reflection (i.e. their silhouette). That led them eventually to give up the experience and walk out of the room, just to hear the droning sounds starting to play. When they looked back, they could also see the visual content on the screens and walls being resumed and that prompted them to give the work a second chance. As one of the participants put it: ‘‘When I walked in, all I could see was myself on the screen. I did not really get it when I got in the space, so I was left with the impression I had entered in the middle of someone else’s experience. I then decided to step out, but as I did so I noticed the lights and sounds had started to come back up’’. It is therefore no surprise that, when asked to talk about specific aspects they liked about the experience, a high number of participants referred to aesthetic elements of the installation—in particular, the colour scheme, the visual patterns on the screens and projections, the multitude of focal points (‘‘it was interesting to see yourself from different perspectives’’) and the droning sound effects. The latter, in particular, were ranked by the vast majority of the participants (10 out of 13) as having greatly enhanced the experience both from aesthetic and interactive viewpoints. Some participants specifically linked the sounds to the heartbeats of a larger organism they felt like being inside of. One participant related the experience as ‘‘a dream where I am inside a large whale’’, while another described it as ‘‘the feeling of being in my mother’s womb’’. In fact, the majority of the participants (9 out of 13) reported this general feeling of comfort, pleasantness, relaxation or enjoyment during the experience—crucially, a feeling always manifested when they were left alone in the space. That is also corroborated by the 6 out of 13 participants declaring the environment as highly immersive and with an ambient feeling, while 5 out of 13 explicitly pointed out the experience was better when they were allowed to have it in privacy. That was indeed an important purpose of the experiment: to test how much social interaction would have been promoted or discouraged by the immersive setting. From the 13 participants, 4 knew their co-participants very well, 3 knew them a little, 4 were strangers to each other and 2

were by themselves. Previous acquaintance between the participants seems to be high relevant on effective personal interaction when a casual encounter is forged within an immersive space. Almost all people who knew each other prior to the sessions (3 out of 4) felt inclined to interact when meeting within the space. Conversely, the majority of those who did not previously know each other (3 out of 4) also decided not to engage in social interaction in this particular scenario. In other words, previously established social ties seem to have been reinforced by the immersive situation. Among the reasons for not engaging in interaction with people, they were not well acquainted with, participants reported ‘‘feeling self-conscious’’, ‘‘shy’’, ‘‘uncomfortable’’ or ‘‘not wanting to disrupt anyone else’s experiences’’ (social politeness). Likewise, those who knew each other well felt naturally more inclined to collaborate, referring to the experience of interacting through the screens as ‘‘good fun’’. Importantly, in both scenarios, the participants reported a significant shift of their focus from their inner emotions to the other person’s actions, how the space could be negotiated and how their joint actions affected the content of the screens. Some of those who knew each other, for example, felt like making compositions with their silhouettes on the displays; conversely, those who did not have a previous social relationship relate sharing the space and the screen to be socially awkward, as if they were invading each other’s private spaces.

8 Discussion The results collected from the field studies reveal interesting insights in regard to type of participation, extent of technology integration into the built environment, spatial design and immersiveness. As repeatedly pointed out, Liquid Light and Chromapollination suggest two extreme approaches of designing audience participation for interactive, public installations. The first approach encourages predominantly performative interaction, while the second approach is of a more ubiquitous nature. Between those two extremes, contextual constraints may be varied in many forms to cater for different design objectives. One relevant variation consists in what we defined as immersive interactions, unifying aspects of interactive performance in a more intimate and enclosed ubiquitous computing environment. Diffused focal points are obtained through the integration (both functional and aesthetic) of the responsive technology into the physical architecture of the space. They have the property of shifting awareness towards the broader work as part of the surrounding environment, enhancing the interplay between people and place and diluting the role of performer across the whole audience. The more

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technology is integrated into the physical environment, the more ambient the feedback becomes and consequently the less intensely the participation unfolds in response to individual actions. In immersive interactions, responses may be spread in space, with feedback to one individual often coming from many different directions; in ubiquitous installations, participation becomes more continuous and inclusive from a crowd perspective since more people engage with the work together and for longer, although often without realising it. Single focal points, by contrast, bias the interaction towards a specific direction, delimiting the playing zone and creating a stage, with the interaction dynamics being driven predominantly by factors revolving around the human ego. In immersive interactions, an intermediate level of direct feedback seems to help offset the ambient responsiveness of the broader environment and make the experience holistic. In performative settings, it creates an immediate division of the audience between performers and spectators, turning the experience into an opportunity for personal expression. Analysing the works in light of the participative strategies delineated by Jacucci et al. [16], it is clear that all three installations made deliberate use of space to guide the interactive experiences and promoted participants’ selfawareness by offering a reinterpretation of their world through technology. Chromapollination (ubiquitous interaction), however, had a greater emphasis in playing with materiality when compared to the other two, given the higher integration of technology with the built environment. Conversely, both Metastasis (immersive interaction) and Liquid Light (performative interaction) afforded connectivity by forging social interactions between participants though their interaction with artificial beings (i.e. their combined silhouettes played in real time on the electronic displays). The very immediate feedback provided by the displays promoted a great sense of authorship among the participants, while the presence of clearly defined focal points led the participants to more proactively engage in performative acts, reaching full expression in Liquid Light’s stage-like spatial layout. In order to gain a greater insight into the impact of immersiveness on the participants and gauge the effectiveness of the design adopted, we ran evaluation sessions for Metastasis followed by semi-structured interviews. The design implications raised by the field studies are discussed below. 8.1 Aesthetics are seemingly crucial to the perceived quality of the immersive experience Most participants referred to the Metastasis experience as beautiful, presentable and stylish. The overall experience was generally also talked about in a positive tone, despite

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also being ranked it as unpredictable, complicated, challenging and confusing. It seems clear that such pleasantness was to a large extent due to the aesthetic values of the work, especially hedonic aspects [10] regarding colours, visual patterns and sounds. The sound effects, specifically, were largely regarded as essential to the mood conveyed by the environment. They were also highly effective as interactive cues to guide the interaction, regaining the attention of all participants who, frustrated, had given up trying to make sense of the interaction. 8.2 Immediate feedback that is directly mapped to the participant’s actions is more important for engagement than a clear narrative As per the previous point, quite a few participants reported relative frustration with not immediately understanding the mechanics regulating the interaction. Yet, the absence of a clear storyline did not heavily compromise the level of engagement with the work, which was still by large able to provide a positive experience. However, some clear and immediate feedback must still be present to sustain the participant’s interest and at least pursue sense making. In the words of a participant: ‘‘Not understanding the concept does not really take very much away from the experience as long as it is responsive. This was just fun—no matter what I did, something happened. If you don’t know what it is about, that’s part of the fun, trying to figure it out’’. 8.3 Immersiveness encompasses physical and behavioural aspects From an architectural perspective, an immersive environment is self-contained, with little or no physical interference from the external world and embedded with technology that surrounds the participants, making it not only responsive but offering stimuli from all around. In face of such features, we could qualify the environment as being physically immersive. From a behavioural perspective, immersive environments attempt to engage the participants in focused interaction through a feedback loop that intends to be sufficiently challenging for people to feel attracted to, yet not too complex so that they feel frustrated for not understanding it. In other words, an immersive responsive environment can promote a sustained conversation with participants, who would potentially experience a state of flow and suspension of self-awareness. It aims to conduce to sensory absorption [26] and instigate in the audience the feeling of being physically part of the installation [26]. We can therefore qualify such environments as behaviourally immersive. Based on the above definitions, we can also

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argue for environments both physically and behaviourally immersive to be further qualified as fully immersive. Liquid Light employed a direct visual feedback similar to Metastasis (displaying the participants’ silhouettes) and the observed behaviour confirmed its playfulness and continuous audience engagement (behavioural immersiveness). The lack of direct feedback and playfulness from Chromapollination, on the other hand, may help explain the more passive reaction to the work. As discussed, Chromapollination seems to have failed in conveying a feeling of behavioural immersiveness [26]—likely because of the fact the interaction was purely based on visuals and media spatial placement (physical immersiveness), lacking clear and recognisable feedback on how an individual’s behaviour affected the installation. 8.4 Fully immersive spaces can provide high emotional rewards Most people perceived the Metastasis environment as pleasant, enjoyable, relaxing, likable, appealing, attractive and captivating. Feelings of comfort and shelter have also been expressed (feeling ‘‘inside a larger being’’, ‘‘a whale’’ or ‘‘a womb’’). The secluded character of the environment contrasted with the exterior daily reality, and the fact it provided an activity not usually available elsewhere also helped to give it a distinctive atmosphere. As one participant pointed out: ‘‘This is definitely out of the ordinary, a bit surrealistic really. That’s what makes it nice, the fact it is a bit more immersive’’. Anecdotal feedback from the audience for Chromapollination also classified that work as aesthetically appealing; however, the behaviour observed in the crowd was clearly more subdued. Liquid Light also attracted a high level of interactive participation, but expressions of emotional delight were observed only when the water mist was released at the back of the space—in other words, when the experience became more physically immersive. 8.5 Fully immersive spaces enabling performance are perceived as private Participants only felt inclined to engage in collaboration with people they already knew very well; otherwise, private interaction was preferred. In other words, the immersive space seemed to be largely perceived as having a private character despite being open to the general public. The usual trust requirements for granting other people the privilege of social interaction in the broader social landscape were still valid at—and perhaps reinforced by—the immersive setting. One participant summarised such perception or privacy and the sudden feeling of liberation that followed: ‘‘The space was quite secluded and private. I felt

Fig. 8 Two people interacting through Metastasis middle screen. Photo courtesy of A. Baki Kocaballi

more inclined to do unusual things since no one was watching’’. 8.6 Social tolerance seems to be proportional to distribution of focal points While interacting with Metastasis, facing the middle screen was the only way participants could easily see themselves on all three displays at once. With the interaction naturally converging at the screen in the centre, when two people shared the space, the focus of their experiences naturally overlapped; any social awkwardness was therefore amplified, since the reason for both people being in the space was to interact with the work and such interaction ended up converging at the same spot (Fig. 8). Placing an extra screen in the space—i.e. facing the one currently in the centre—might have helped to alleviate such tension. That could have in turn increased social tolerance in the shared space and consequently encouraged a more mild but sustainable social interaction. Likewise, the audience in Chromapollination appeared to negotiate the space in a very harmonious manner, with an even distribution of people across the interactive space. Liquid Light, in contrast, was clearly socially divisive, splitting the audience into performers and spectators. Metastasis offered some very interesting insights into the nature of environments where performative and ubiquitous design aspects are blended together. It should be noticed, however, that this has only been the first research iteration we performed to investigate such hybrid environments; many other combinations of the contextual constraints described in this article could be attempted. In future research iterations, we expect to investigate some of those other variations in the performative and ubiquitous aspects of responsive environments and, hopefully, further refine the initial outcomes here discussed.

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9 Conclusion In this article, we analysed the impact of utilising interactive technology in public artworks as a means of enticing and sustaining collective participation in response to contextual constraints. We deployed and studied three installations in different public settings and interpreted the results using a research in and through design methodology. From the analysis of the design approaches adopted to address their very different contexts, we unveiled three separate categories of interactive public artworks eliciting experiences we referred to, respectively, as performative, immersive and ubiquitous interactions—indicating, in this order, both the increasing ubiquity of the environment and the decreasing level of performance by the participants. For each category, we discussed design methods that can be tuned in order to maximise the envisaged collective participation while adhering to the given contextual constraints. Based on the results from the field studies, we found that performative interactions can be encouraged by (1) reducing the number of focal points; (2) devising a one-toone mapping between input from the audience and feedback from the installation; (3) employing standalone media (e.g. clearly visible media displays playing content); (4) minimising the use of highly tangible environments (which could otherwise diffuse the focal points set for the experience); and (5) reducing the need for making the work situated, thus again increasing the importance of the single focal point as sufficient ‘‘beacon’’ for the content. Conversely, ubiquitous interactions can be encouraged by (1) reducing or eliminating obvious focal points; (2) making the feedback from the work more diffused and ambiguous; (3) physically embedding the medium into the work; (4) making strong use of tangible experiences, haptic interfaces and materials inviting to be physically experienced through touch; and (5) aiming for a work which is highly situated, perceived as blending into the surrounding environment while at the same time augmenting it. Immersive environments like Metastasis represent a hybrid scenario that contains both performative and ubiquitous design elements (although to a lesser extent than both ‘‘fully’’ performative and ‘‘fully’’ ubiquitous settings). We then probed the impact of such an immersive environment in the audience’s emotions, behaviour and social engagement. We presented the structure of the user sessions dedicated to gauge such impact. Finally, we analysed the outcomes of such user sessions in terms of implications for the design of public immersive performances and compared them to the field observations on the audience behaviour for the two previous installations in the open space. As a result of the study, we identified immersive performances as a

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design scenario suitable for intimate and reflective yet emotionally rewarding interactive experiences. We believe the findings from the studies presented in this article can significantly assist the future design of customised interactive experiences in the public space with clear strategies for highlighting the interface or making it fade into the background in response to contextual constraints and to address specific interactive design goals.

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