Understanding and Designing for the Voluntary Adoption of Community Displays

Understanding Understanding and Designing for the Voluntary Adoption of  Community Displays Harry Brignull

Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis has not been submitted, either in the same or different form, to this or any other university for a degree.

Harry Brignull

Contents i

Acknowledgements

ii

Preface

iii

Abstract

5

Chapter 1 Introduction

14

Chapter 2 Background

55

Chapter 3 Studying the social nature of a large display in a communal space

76

Chapter 4 The adoption of the Opinionizer Community Display in a one-shot setting

99

Chapter 5 Informing the design of Dynamo: a Community Display for on-going usage settings

Acknowledgements This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Mike Scaife, who sadly died in December 2001. Mike helped me become an HCI researcher, so his influence will stay with me for the rest of my life. Thanks Mike. Mike Scaife and Yvonne Rogers tutored me while I was an undergraduate, a Masters student, and supervised me during my PhD. Thank you both for all your support and inspiration. Without your guidance I would not be here today. Geraldine Fitzpatrick took on the tricky task of supervising me throughout my thesis write-up. Thank you for the amazing amount of effort you have put in, particularly those brain-bending sessions in front f ront of the whiteboard. I must also thank the other people I collaborated with during the EPSRC funded Dynamo project. Shahram Izadi, my research colleague, spent a significant chunk of his life working closely with me on the project, and has

Preface Part of the work in these pages has also appeared in the various forms below, and was part of the EPSRC funded Dynamo project (GR/N01125). The papers below and the user-studies reported within them were the product of collaborative group work between myself and the other Dynamo project members: Shahram Izadi, Yvonne Rogers, Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Tom Rodden. My contributions to this collaborative work included the design and building of prototypes; the planning, design and running of user studies; and a substantial part of the analysis. However, it should be noted that the analysis and discussion carried out within this thesis is entirely my own work, and considerably extends that reported within the papers below.

Brignull, H., Izadi, S., Fitzpatrick, G., Rogers, Y., & Rodden, T. (2004). The introduction of a shared interactive surface into a communal space In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM  conference on Computer supported cooperative work  (pp. 49-58). Chicago, Illinois, USA

Abstract Community Displays are a new genre of large digital wall display system for the support of informal social interaction in communal spaces. Prior research shows that encouraging the initial voluntary adoption of  Community Displays in situ can be difficult, and is currently not well understood. This problem is investigated in this thesis. t hesis. A critical analysis of research studies is carried out, revealing two distinct categories of Community Display settings: “one shot’ and “on-going” usage. Three case studies are carried out, which investigate the similarities and differences between these settings in terms of Community Display usage and voluntary adoption. A combination of observational studies, laboratory studies and prototyping are employed. The first case study observes the use of a physically large display in a shared office by a team of  locally mobile workers, and provides a grounding understanding of the situated use of large displays. The second case study involves the

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction I ntroduction _________________________ _________________________________________________ ________________________ 5 1.2 Overview of Thesis ___________________________________________ 6 Chapter 2: Background ______________________ ______________________________________________ __________________________ __ 6 Chapter 3: Studying the social nature of a large display in a communal space. _____ 7 Chapter 4: The adoption of the Opinionizer Community Display in a one-shot usage setting ______________________ _____________________________________________ __________________________________ ___________ 8 Chapter 6: Preliminary observational study of an on-going usage setting _________ 10 Chapter 7: The adoption of the Dynamo Community Display in an on-going usage setting. __________________________ _________________________________________________ _____________________________ ______ 11 Chapter 8: Discussion ____________________ ___________________________________________ ____________________________ _____ 12 Chapter 9: Conclusions and Future Work _____________________ _________________________________ ____________ 13

1.1 Introduction This thesis investigates the problem space of designing Community Displays, a new genre of digital wall display system for the support of  informal social interaction in communal spaces. An analysis of prior research reported in Chapter 2 shows that achieving initial voluntary adoption by a community is a crucial “first hurdle” that many systems fail on, even for those that are technically impressive and feature-rich. The contribution of this thesis is that it provides the beginnings of a lingua franca or framework for researchers and system designers, enabling them to better understand the interplay between the settings, the social behaviour, the voluntary adoption and the design issues that are at work in the design, use and appropriation of Community Displays. The key concepts put forward include: •

The definition of “one shot” and “on-going” settings , which

This thesis is structured as follows: Chapter 2 provides the background to this research, detailing a literature review, an analysis of the problem-space, and the research questions. Following this, three case studies are reported, beginning with an initial grounding case study in Chapter 3, a main case study in chapter 4, and the largest case study is reported in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. Chapter 8 consists of the thesis discussion, and Chapter 9, the future work  and conclusions. The rest of this chapter will provide a more detailed chapter-by-chapter overview of the thesis.

1.2 Overview of Thesis Chapter 2: Background This chapter details the nature of communal spaces and Community Displays, relating them to literature and research in the area. It begins by introducing the problem of the voluntary adoption of technology:

This leads into the specific problem addressed by this thesis: the situated voluntary adoption of Community Displays. Examples are given from the literature which demonstrate the existence of this problem, together with a heterogeneity in the nature of the deployment sites in which it has been observed. A critical analysis of the properties of these sites gives rise to a characterization of these sites into two kinds of setting: “one-shot” usage settings and “on-going” usage settings. Following this analysis, the thesis research questions are then put forward, followed by the approach and methodology.

Chapter 3: Studying the social nature of a large display in a communal space. This chapter details an initial investigation into the properties of large displays and their situated and social nature when used in a communal

These findings are applied and refined in the following two case studies, where they provide a focus for the analysis of situated voluntary adoption of  Community Displays.

Chapter 4: The adoption of the Opinionizer Community Display in a one-shot usage setting This chapter details the investigation of the nature of voluntary adoption of  a Community Display called ‘Opinionizer’, in a one-shot usage type of  communal space, specifically, social gathering events (parties). This work  was carried out in the following manner: first, the Opinionizer prototype was designed, drawing upon findings from the previous case study and related work. Following this, two field studies were carried out, in which Opinionizer was deployed at two social gathering events, a book-launch party at a conference, and a postgraduate welcoming party at a university. In the analysis of the findings, the concepts of the “honey-pot effect” and

Factors found to deter adoption were found to be a fear of social awkwardness (feeling “on stage”) and the length of the queue, among others.

Chapter 5: Informing the design of Dynamo: a Community Display for on-going usage settings Dynamo, a novel Community Display system was developed as part of the EPSRC “Dynamo” project. This chapter details how its design was informed by the interpretation of the previous case study findings and related work into some “initial user-experience principles”, contributing to the development of Dynamo Version 1 (V1). One of the key suggestions was to make the Community Display’s resources openly accessible to all community members, since this seemed to facilitate uptake in the previous two case studies by making the interaction model simple and therefore easy

Chapter 6: Preliminary observational study of an on-going usage setting

This chapter describes a 5 day long preliminary observational study of an on-going usage setting- the common room of a 6 th form college. The aim of  this study was to investigate its suitability as a potential deployment site, and to provide a grounding description of the community’s existing activities, practices and flow, in order to offer a point of comparison with the effects of Dynamo after it was deployed. To summarize the findings of this preliminary observational study, the common room was found to have many of the hallmarks of an “on-going” communal space. It was used by an established community and members were generally familiar with one another; the room was used on a daily basis by much of the community; and it was used predominantly for

Chapter 7: The adoption of the Dynamo Community Display in an on-going usage setting. This chapter details a ten day long observational study of Dynamo V2 in the college common room. The findings showed that over the course of the study, the community progressed from initially treating it like a normal PC, to eventually developing a recognized set of practices, which are detailed in this chapter. As found in the previous case study, learning about the system tended to occur vicariously, and interaction in relation to the Community Display occurred at different levels of engagement, from peripheral overseeing through to direct interaction. However, in this setting, since user exposure to the system spanned a long duration, this did not manifest itself in the oneshot studies as two prominent thresholds that user needed to cross. Instead, it enabled many community members to learn about the system gradually while going about their other daily activities, through the employment of 

Chapter 8: Discussion This chapter takes stock from the findings of all the user studies carried out in this thesis, and incorporates them into a cohesive account of the way the Community Displays in one-shot and on-going settings studied were adopted and used, addressing each of the research questions and providing suggestions for the design of future f uture Community Display systems. In summary, the characterisation of one-shot and on-going usage settings is shown to be meaningful and useful. The user studies corroborate the analysis of the literature put forward in Chapter 2, showing that the two settings have marked differences in their nature, which has a substantial effect on the situated user behaviour and voluntary adoption that occurs in them. As such, each setting demands a different kind of Community Display system. The concepts and interaction models put forward for the two settings are

Chapter 9: Conclusions and Future Work This chapter reflects on the thesis research as a whole, details a number important avenues for future research in this area, and then concludes the thesis, summarizing its contributions. One of the important avenues suggested for future research in this area is the progression beyond the one-shot and on-going setting characterization. Through a literature review and an analysis of a number of hypothetical settings, some suggestions are made for other ways in which these settings vary beyond those investigated in this thesis. These include differences between “loose knit” and “close knit” communities; and the effect of  “mixed settings” in which different communities with different needs use the same communal space together. Also, a proposal is made for future research in the field of Community Displays to place an emphasis on the importance of reporting voluntary adoption problems as well as successes, in order to help the field move

Chapter 2 Background to this thesis

2.1 Introduction

15

2.2 Adoption: the key to the success of any technology

17

2.1 Introduction Figure 2.0 provides a visual overview of its scope of this thesis. Originating from an interest in Community Display systems, the problem of voluntary adoption is found to be an important problem in need of investigation. Therefore this research lies at the intersection of research on adoption, and research on Community Displays. Its motivation lies in the improvement Community Displays, with the aim to develop concepts and uncover pertinent issues for Community Display system designers, to help them develop systems that actually get used by their target communities.

Some underpinning research is then detailed, describing the inherent social nature of physically large displays. This then leads into the specific problem-space of this thesis: the voluntary adoption of Community Display systems. The widespread nature of  voluntary adoption problems is described, described, referencing a

number user

studies from the Community Display literature. The diverse and varied nature of these studies is discussed. A critical analysis gives rise to six dimensions on which studies vary, and from these, two types of setting are characterized: “one-shot” and “on-going” usage. The differences of  voluntary adoption problems between these two settings are described. This analysis gives rise to a set of research questions that this thesis aims to address. Finally, the methodological approach chosen to study these research questions is described.

2.2 Adoption: the key to the success of any technology “New technology intended to support cooperation often risks initial rejection” (Francik et al., 1991; p. 53) “Getting a new idea i dea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is often very difficult.” (Rogers, 1962; p. 1)

Adoption of technology by end users is key to its success: even the most brilliant and beneficial innovation is worth nothing if it does not get used. Many technologies suffer from delays in achieving adoption. For example, when Bell Co. attempted to introduce the telephone into America, it was delayed for years while consumers simply couldn’t fathom its potential usefulness (Aronson, 1968; Seely-Brown & Duguid, 2000). More recently, voicemail was reported to have taken approximately 10 years to achieve widespread adoption (Francik et al., 1991), while the fax machine took  approximately 50 years (O’Brien, 1989). This shows that it is not just quality or usefulness that determines successful adoption: the above

the most well known is the problem of achieving “critical mass” (Ehrlich, 1987; as cited in Grudin, 1988). Also known as the “network effect” (Liebowitz & Margolis, 1998), 1998), it can be described described as a person’s decision decision to use a tool being determined by whether other people they know also use it. Email, for example, would be of no value to a user if they knew no-one else who used it. Thus voluntary adoption depends not on the decisions of  isolated individuals, but on the emergent effect of interactions between people in a community. Adoption can be explored from a number of different perspectives. For example, it can be considered from a marketplace perspective, in which case marketing, pricing, infrastructure and industrial standards play a large role in determining success (e.g. Liebowitz & Margolis, 1998). This is a primary concern of commercial enterprises. Adoption can also be considered in terms of its diffusion through the formal structure of an organization, which is a primary concern of organizational perspectives (e.g. Grudin, 1988.

This perspective enables researchers to address questions about how users react to a system when they use it for the first time, how they then learn about the system and its features, how adoption takes place socially between immediate colleagues or friends, and what social roles it develops through use. To quote Bradner et al. (1999), “[U]nderstanding adoption requires careful examination of the interactions between technological features and  the social context of use” (p. 139).

2.2 Informal Social Interaction in Communal Spaces The focus of CSCW is to develop an understanding of collaborative work  activities with a view to informing the design of computer technology to support them. The focus of this thesis is closely related yet different, since it looks specifically at informal social interaction, not work activities per se. It looks at this within a particular kind of social setting: communal spaces.

are not “communal spaces” since usage in these settings is typically planned, scheduled, and there is little overlap or mixing between different people engaged in different activities in the same space. The nature of interaction in communal spaces is typically informal, i nformal, which is believed by some to serve a community-building function (e.g. Whittaker et al., 1994). They are often comfortable places in which people pass time (Oldenburg, 1989), and interact with others for the purpose of enjoyment. Common language offers a number of different words to describe them, such as the French “rendezvous”, the American “hang-out”, the Greek  “agora” and the Roman-derived “forum”. In research, there are also a number of different terms which refer to communal spaces, each being slightly different in their definition definition and purpose. One of the most well known is Oldenburg’s (1989) concept of “the third place”, which places a large emphasis on the role they take in supporting local community and encouraging sociability. Oldenburg (1989) characterizes places into three

educational establishments and members’ clubs as well as workplaces, and so offers an unnecessarily narrow view. It is for this reason that this thesis adopts the more general term “communal space”, which, although less widely used, is recognised by other researchers in the field fi eld (e.g. Churchill et al., 2004; Russell & Sue, 2001; Huang & Mynatt, 2003; Rogers & Rodden, 2003). Other related terms include “social condenser”, a term from architecture that describes places which serve socialising functions (e.g. Hughes, 1991); “transitional space”: which describes spaces that people move through but do not spend extended durations within (e.g. Sawhney, et al., 2000); and “interstitial space”, which describes spaces between architectural structures (Tschumi, 1994), as well as various others. Traditionally, communal spaces have received little specific technological support for the informal social interactions that take place there. With the increased awareness of the value of co-present, informal and community interaction, and the movement of research interest “away from the desktop”

members are involved in selecting the material that is displayed, either actively, by explicitly putting material on the display, or passively, via sensors and system interpretation of user profiles (see Figure 2.2 on page 43 for some examples). Community displays are widely believed to have the potential to play a role in supporting community and enhancing “social capital”, which can be likened to a stock of altruism and friendly favours which community members develop and exchange with each other through ongoing social interaction (Grasso et al., 2003; McCarthy, 2003; Zhao & Stasco, 2002). However, the scope of this thesis is within the support of  informal social interactions rather than the emergent effect on community as a whole, which is discussed in detail elsewhere (e.g. Resnick, 2002). Community Display systems are referred to by a variety of names. For example: “public displays” (Black et al., 2004), “situated displays”, “peripheral displays” (McCarthy et al., 2004), “ambient displays” (Mankoff  & Dey, 2004; Grasso et al., 2004), “large format information appliances”

planned meetings and work activities, and thus their t heir analysis lies outside the scope of this thesis. The field of Community Displays is nascent, and much of its research has taken place during the course of this five year PhD research (2000-2005). The motivation to develop and study Community Displays may have partly emerged from the previously-mentioned research in other settings (e.g. interactive whiteboards in meeting rooms) and the increasing availability of  the technology. However, aside from this technological motivation, over the past decade a body of evidence has emerged which shows that all large displays have an inherently social nature owing to their physically large sizes. This provides a sociological motivation to develop and study Community Displays. The following section will critically evaluate this research.

displays as being ‘publicly available’ (e.g. Heath and Luff, 1991; Robertson, 2002), allowing the information displayed to be used by multiple people in cooperative activities. This is a property which has been observed in many kinds of physical artefacts (e.g. Robertson, 2002; Hughes et al.,1992; Moran & Anderson, 1990; Suchman, 1987), but is considered to be particularly prominent in large displays owing to their size. Together with their situatedness, it is their physical size that gives large displays their special nature. An analysis of the literature on large displays was carried out, revealing them to have four main social properties, shown in figure 2.1, below.

2.3.1 Information Dissemination Anecdotally, we have all had experience with the use of large displays for information dissemination. Noticeboards, railway time-tables, road signs, billboard advertisements and graffiti are all examples, which take advantage of the size and positioning of the display to visually broadcast information to people in the vicinity. Bellotti and Rogers (1997) report an account of a manager in a newspaper publishing company constructing a large information display by painstakingly copying details each day from their group project management software system onto a whiteboard in a shared office, because it “provided an effective public reminder of what was urgent  and needed doing that day” (p. 282). In a study of a team of programmers,

Whittaker and Schwarz (1995) observed a similar scenario. Here, the programmers chose to use traditional pin-and-paper noticeboards in a communal space to plan and coordinate their programming projects, instead of the project management software assigned to them by their company.

2.3.2 Awareness Awareness is something that pervades all aspects of human interaction – put simply, for a person to interact with something, they need to be aware of it. For this reason, awareness is intrinsically related to every property listed in this section. The topic of awareness has been much researched and discussed within CSCW and its related fields, but even so, it is still difficult to define and has received many attempted definitions and classifications. To quote Pedersen and Sokoler (1997) “awareness… is one of the most  tricky and dangerous terms in psychology” (p. 52). Robertson (2002) draws

attention to the “bewildering array” of awareness terminology: “Awareness must be one of the most extensively qualified concepts in CSCW. […] Gutwin identified workspace, organisational, situation, informal, social and structural as

we do so” (p. 51). In CSCW, the concept of awareness is usually applied to

awareness of other people, work activities, and the artefacts that are used. In co-operative activities, awareness allows people to understand what others are doing and thus to plan and coordinate their own actions (Bellotti & Dourish, 1993). Robinson (1993) describes the nature of a hotel key-rack: a large, centrally located and publicly-visible display located in a hotel foyer, consisting of an array of pigeon-holes. He states that, among other important functions, it provides an important awareness function for staff and guests: “Guests can leave and collect their keys, can see which other guests are in or out, and  leave messages in the pigeonholes. […] Hotel staff use it to place bills […] etc. to be given out to guests. The presence of keys, or contents of    pigeonholes, conveys information, and may be the subject of questions or  discussion” (p. 190) This example shows how a large display can be well

suited to fostering awareness owing to its inherent public availability.

more than that which we immediately attend to: we have the ability to perceive things peripherally (e.g. “out of the corner of your eye”) as well as focally. Research in vision psychology details the physiological and neurological basis for this (Pedersen et al., 1997). This peripheral awareness provides us with the ability to be aware of multiple things at the same time, and therefore to participate in multiple activities. In an analysis of case studies of a team of architects, and of workers in a financial dealing room, Luff and Jirotka (1998) found that people engaged in co-located interaction drew upon an array of interactional resources. These include shared artefacts, body movement, orientation, gesture and pointing, and are used both in focal and peripheral interactions. Specifically, people may say or do something for the benefit of others who may be in the midst of other activities and only watching “out of the corner of their eye”: “Participants frequently adopt orientations which allow them to monitor, oversee and overhear the conduct of others. When

driver on the radio, which the DIA (his colleague, the “Divisional Information Assistant”) notices: “The DIA's looking [at the fixed line diagram] is motivated and driven by virtue of the Controller's attempt to call a driver, and the DIA scans the fixed line diagram in order to provide an account for the upcoming intervention. Moreover, the DIA, is not only able to overhear the Controller, and assume that they have mutual access to the same information displays, but is also able to discern, through peripherally monitoring the actions of his colleague, where the Controller might be looking and what he might have seen. The various information displays, and their use by particular individuals, is publicly visible and can be used as a resource in determining courses of action and for the mutual coordination of conduct.” (p. 9)

Since the large displays have a large interaction space, this enables people to be peripherally aware of them across a wide area – they provide a medium that people can employ to broadcast information to others. Also,

1999). Research has found that a shared point of reference can help establish common ground and mutual knowledge, provide a means to monitor comprehension, and enable effective communication by allowing deixis, i.e. pointing or other physical references to the visual representation, rather than needing a full verbal description (Kraut et al., 2002). Jordan and Henderson (1995) make a similar point in their analysis of large displays: “[Large Displays] often provide a crucial focal point for marshalling a group's attention. They also serve the important function of supporting the public availability of the information they display…” (p. 41)

They then go on to state that having a shared point of reference creates conversation opportunities: “In industrial process control rooms, large public information displays often not only disseminate information but also provide the resources for making that information available

opportunities for social interaction because people are more likely to bump into each other serendipitously serendipitously (“by happy happy accident”). In a field study of a university library, Twidale et al. (1995) observe this happening: “In the case of Lancaster University Library, the layout promotes informal social interaction by placing communal services (help desks, photocopying, etc.) around a large public space. […] [that creates] opportunities for spontaneous colocated synchronous collaboration. […] For example, a student printing search results found an uncollected printout and inquired whose it was – when the owner was identified he proceeded to use the results to discuss the CD-ROM system.” (p. 9)

Isaacs et al. (1996) observe that colleagues often meet at high traffic areas, where there are shared resources such as coffee machines or water coolers. Also, Perry et al. (1999) found, in a field study of the management office of  a construction site, that large pin-and-paper displays showing project information served to encourage and support serendipitous interactions.

section will show, these social properties have been exploited by designers of Community Display systems in varying extents and to various different ends. However, little is yet known about exactly how these properties interact when Community Displays are used in communal spaces, and what the implications are for voluntary adoption. As such, this presents itself as the first set of research questions for this thesis:

1. Understanding the phenomena of situated social behaviour around Community Displays a. What common phenomena of situated behaviour are observed across all the case studies? b. How are the social properties of a Community Display involved in these phenomena? c. How does this relate to the process of community adoption?

interfaces, such as FXPal’s Plasma Poster (Churchill et al., 2003, Figure 2.2b); XRCE’s Community Wall, Intel’s GroupCast and Outcast, and Carnegie Mellon’s Messyboard (Fass et al., 2002; Figure 2.2f). Other methods of posting include email, e.g. Plasma Poster, Community Wall, and Apple NewsLens (Houde et al., 1998); SMS and MMS, such as SPAM, ECT (Greenhalgh et al., 2004), the Orange™ SMS board (Figure 2.2d), and Meshbox™ (Anderson, 2003); paper scanners , such as Community Wall’s usage of Xerox Dataglyph™ technology), and extensions of drag-and-drop on the Windows™ desktop (Greenberg & Rounding, 2001). Many of the systems automate the decisions about presentation by taking a time-sharing approach, displaying items one-at-time in a “rotating billboard” style, and removing items from the “pool” when they pass a certain age (e.g. two weeks, Churchill et al., 2003). These include FXPal’s Plasma Poster (Churchill et al, 2003), and the Apple NewsLens (Houde et al, 1998). The Speakeasy display divides the screen up into a simple

2.4.2 Immediate Display and Exchange service The “immediate display and exchange” service is a Community Display service that caters for small co-present groups to spontaneously use the Community Display to show each other, exchange, and possibly work on media (e.g. annotate it or take notes). It primarily builds on the “shared point of reference” property of large displays (see Section 2.4.3). This service places emphasis on rapidity, ease of use, and minimising configuration problems in accessing or exchanging media. Examples include Blueboard (Russell, 2003) , the Speakeasy Public Display (Black et al., 2003), the Intel Personal Server situated display concept (Want et al., 2002), Dynamo (See Chapter 7) and, to an extent, Messyboard (Fass et al., 2002). An example of a Community Display which provides an immediate display and exchange service is Blueboard (Russell et al., 2002; as shown in Figure 2.2c, p. 43). A group of users can gather round Blueboard and log in simply

submitted media, called the “media soup”. Any user, however, can connect to the display via laptop or PDA, allowing them to take control of it. This enables them to control the current media on display (e.g. to browse a website), or take over the entire display with a copy of the screen of their personal device (cf. “VNC”, Richardson et al., 1998), allowing them to show their screen to a larger number of people. Some “immediate display and exchange” services explicitly attempt to support group interaction with the Community Display. For example, some use touchscreens which are thought to be more suited to group interaction because users can easily take turns with their fingers while standing around the display, compared to other input devices such as mice which need to be passed around (cf. Inkpen et al. 1999; Shu, 1992). Russell (2003) claims that users quickly adjusted to turn taking using the touchscreen on Blueboard without a serious impact on their activities. Synchronous multi-user systems such as Single Display Groupware (SDG)

2.4.3 Passive Awareness services Passive awareness services are intended to support community members’ awareness of each other’s interests and activities while requiring very little effort or interaction from the users. These services attempt to explicitly build on the awareness property of large displays (see Section 2.3.2). Unlike noticeboard services or immediate display and exchange services, users do not explicitly initiate an interaction or put up media themselves. Instead the passive awareness service will gather relevant content itself and display it with minimal explicit effort from the users. For example, the service might parse content from local web pages (Stasko & Zhao, 2002). Also, passive awareness services often detect the presence and identity of people in the vicinity of the Community Displays using sensor technology (e.g. computer vision or RFID tags), and then, using profiles of users’ interests, show media that may be relevant to them or that matches a shared interest of two or more parties, with the aim of facilitating conversation.

required to carry) and a beacon on the public displays. “Friend of a friend” information about common common interests and colleagues colleagues is then displayed in an abstract manner, either on the “Iconic” display, using abstract icons, or the “Lexical” display, using brief textual descriptions. However, initial user studies revealed problems with the design of their visual representations, giving users problems in making sense of the information. Intel’s “Autospeaker ID Proactive Display” (McCarthy et al., 2004) offers a basic passive awareness service – when a person moves into the vicinity of  the display, their name, affiliation and photo is shown in a large size on the Community Display. This is carried out using RFID tags which were distributed to the community, and a tag reader attached to the display. Autospeaker ID was specifically developed for use in a conference hall, to be positioned next to the microphone at the front of the room used for audience questions at the end of each presentation. This gives the audience a greater awareness of who is asking a question, thus facilitating knowledge

that they both share a common interest in wine (information that had been previously gathered by the system at an earlier point in time). McCarthy claims that by learning a little more about each other, this makes them more likely to have conversations in the future (p. 287), which he suggests can promote “a sense of community” (p. 306) and “increase social capital” (p. 284). Other examples of Community Display system that offer similar passive awareness services include MIT’s “Aware Community Portal” (Sawhney et al., 2001), IBM’s Fishtank Community Display (Farrell, 2001). Other passive awareness services collect and aggregate demographic information about people in the vicinity, providing overview visualisations. Borovoy et al.’s Community Mirror (1998) draws information from meme tags, which are wearable badges with small displays which show textual memes (e.g. “Computing should be about insight, not numbers”) which community members can transmit to each other using buttons on their badges. This information is aggregated and visualised as graphs on the

2.5 Voluntary Adoption of Community Displays This section will critically evaluate current research relating to the voluntary adoption problems of Community Displays. In particular, it will draw attention to the diversity of these different studies, and propose some dimensions on which they differ. Community Display research systems have often been successful in supporting informal social interaction in communal spaces. For example, McCarthy et al. (2004) reported that in a field study of their “Proactive” Community Displays deployed at a conference, they experienced “some success in creating greater awareness and interaction opportunities within the conference community” (p. 9). They also reported that according to

survey responses new members of the community reported that the system helped them learn new things about other conference attendees and interact with people they didn’t already know.

they tended “not to perceive information on which they do not have reason to focus”, and that they should be “made aware of the benefits of such displays” to encourage use (p. 3). Agamanolis (2002) reported after studies

of the MIT Human Connectedness Community Display prototypes, “Half  the battle in designing an interactive situated or public display is designing how the display will invite that interaction”.

Given the young age of the field, there is a great diversity in the research carried out on Community Displays –there is even little agreement on the name of the field. Furthermore, little has yet been done to categorize and understand the differences between the diverse items of research. For example, Intel’s Proactive Displays (McCarthy, 2004) were designed for and studied within a conference setting, Churchill et al.’s (2004) Plasma Poster was designed for and studied within workplace communal areas; and Borovoy et al.’s Community Mirror (1998) was designed for and studied within a social “party” event. Figure 2.2 overleaf shows photographs of six

knit” community, in which each member knows few of the other community members, or it may be “tight-knit” community, where they know many others. These terms are used by social network researchers to give a generalized description of the community interconnectedness (e.g. Wellman, 1996; Wellman, et al., 2002; Burt, 2000). Other similar descriptors are used by social network researchers, such as “sparse” or “dense” knit (e.g. Guiffe, 1999). Other notable dimensions include the activities normally carried out in the space, and the duration and frequency people normally spend there. Finally, the systems themselves will differ in terms of the services they offer, as described in section 2.4. These six dimensions are depicted in Figure 2.3, below.

Reference

Proactive Displays

Intellibadge Public Display

AgentSalon

Iconic & lexical

Community Mirror

Community Wall

Palimpsest

McCarthy, 2003

Cox et al., 2003

Sumi & Mase, 2001

Carter et al., 2002

Borovoy et al., 1998

Agostini et al., 2002

Agamanolis, 2003

Type of Communal Space

Conference Centre

Social event in workplace venue

Social Event in reception area

Naval Museum

Local digital film and art festival

Permanence of Communal Space

3-4 days

Few hours

Few hours

Permanent

1 day

Duration & frequency spent in proximity

Conference Breaks: typically up to one 1 hour break and two shorter breaks.

A single visit to a social gathering for one hour

A single visit to a social gathering for an afternoon

Activity normally carried out

Attending conference, socialising, getting refreshments

Socialize

Socialize

Community Interconnectedness

Generally loose knit: International community brought together for few days, a combination of established and nascent parts

Loose-knit: familiar strangers i.e. work colleagues who don’t know each other well

Mixed: work colleagues (tightknit) and lab visitors (loose-knit)

Typically people visit one time only, duration probably approx 3 hrs Learn about naval history, interaction with exhibits. Very loose-knit: museum visitors unlikely to know each other outside immediate friends

Typically one time visit. duration probably approx 3 hrs Trying out exhibits, of which this was one. Loose-knit –  festival attendees united by an interest in film and art.

System Services

Passive Awareness

Passive Awareness

Noticeboard (among other services)

Passive Awareness

Passive Awareness

Noticeboard

Noticeboard

Adoption Issues

None reported

None reported

None reported

People tended to ignore the displays

None reported

Usage was generally low

None reported

Table 2.1: Analysis of field studies in “one-shot” usage settings

43

Apple NewsLens

Community Wall

Reference

Houde et al., 1998

Grasso, 2003

Type of Communal Space

Workplace coffee room

Workplace communal area

Plasma Poster

Blueboard

X-cast trio

Notification Collage

Community Wall (different location)

Churchill et al., 2003 Workplace shared kitchen & other locations

Russell & Sue, 2003 Workplace: coffee room & other locations

McCarthy et al., 2001.

Greenberg & Rounding, 2001

Agostini et al., 2002

Workplace foyer area & corridors

Research lab communal space

Town Square

A few minutes while passing through space to and from workstation area.

Not specified, probably consists mainly of short visits (e.g. 5-10 minutes) while passing through

Permanence of Communal Space

Permanent

Duration & frequency spent in proximity

A few short visits a day during breaks, occasional “passing through” to use shared resources in the space or simply as a thoroughfare.

Passed by momentarily many times during working day

Activity normally carried out

Coffee Break, socializing, discussion Thoroughfare

Thoroughfare

Thoroughfare to lab space

Community Interconnectedness

Close knit: established, academic research groups

Passing through, shopping, socialising in cafes, etc. medium or close knit: an established village community

System Services

Noticeboard

Noticeboard

Passive Awareness

Immediate Display and Exchange

Noticeboard

Noticeboard, Passive Awareness

Noticeboard

Adoption issues

Usage dropped off after initial interest. Encouragement needed

None reported

Initially, users needed constant encouragement and demonstration

None reported

None reported

Co-present usage rarely occurred while remote usage flourished.

None reported

Table 2.2: Analysis of field studies in “on-going” usage settings

44

An analysis of tables 2.1 and 2.2 show a marked clustering on two of the dimensions:

“permanence

of

communal

space”,

and

“community

interconnectedness”. These give rise to the one-shot and on-going characterizations. To elaborate, table 2.1 shows the clustering within the “one shot” setting characterisation. All of the examples in this table are temporary events, such as conferences (McCarthy, 2003; Cox et al., 2003, Sumi & Mase, 2001), rather than permanent communal spaces, and are typically used by looseknit communities. As the examples show, users are exposed to the Community Display for only a short period – up to a few hours in total, before the event finishes. A common activity seen in the majority of the examples is socializing, which may complement other activities, such as viewing presentations or exhibits. Conversely, Table 2.2 shows the clustering within the “on-going” usage setting characterisation. A typical example in this table is a workplace

Figure 2.4: The on-going and one-shot settings sett ings shown on two defining dimensions.

participants did not realize what the Community Displays had to offer, nor that the displayed information could actually be a useful adjunct to their conversations. This example draws attention to the fact that participants need to know what a Community Display does before they can decide to benefit from its functionality, and if this is unclear, adoption is going to be hindered. The participants only had the duration of the social gathering to learn this and make the decision to use it, otherwise they would have missed their chance and may never have been exposed to the exact same Community Display again. McCarthy’s (2003) Proactive Displays (“Autospeaker ID” and “Ticket to Talk”, detailed in Section 2.4.3) were a successful pair of Community Displays for one-shot settings . Designed for and deployed at a conference, 201 out of 500 attendees registered to use the system. 94 responded to a survey, of which 64% stated that they considered the Proactive displays to have had a positive impact on the conference.

Community Display systems. (McCarthy, Personal Communication, March 10 2005), which included making the community more aware of their existence and making registration easier and more rapid. Unlike the Proactive Displays, Community Wall offers a range of  functionality, including the browsing of community-related web pages, and facilities for freehand annotation (Agostini et al., 2002). Community Wall was generally deployed and studied in on-going settings. However, in one field study, it was deployed in. a one-shot usage setting, specifically, a museum. Agostini et al. found that interaction with it was consistently low. It can be postulated that perhaps the system was too complicated for this setting and it may not have been clear enough to the passers-by how they would benefit from a short one-time interaction with it. In summary, voluntary adoption problems within one-shot usage scenarios relate to whether users can discover the functionality of Community Display, decide to “buy in” to it, and then try it out, all within the small

2.5.2 Voluntary Adoption in the “on-going” usage category Voluntary adoption problems in the on-going usage scenario are different in nature. Rather than needing to achieve just a single interaction from passers by, the goal is to t o achieve repeat usage within an established community, and ultimately take on a familiar role in community life. Churchill et al. (2002) found, in an early study on Plasma Poster, that initially, users needed “constant encouragement and demonstration” (p.6). Achieving first time usage from community members is therefore still a crucial challenge in adoption in this category. Similarly, Grasso et al. (2003) found that Community Wall “met with initial scepticism and many people were not sure that it would be of any use” (p. 227). However, in this

category of setting, the time frame is much longer, removing the urgency and shifting the focus to the longer term. In on-going usage communal spaces, there is an established community with existing practices and activities, into which the Community Display

advertisement to sell their car, three people independently complained and asked to have it taken down, because it did not fit the accepted themes of  community research interests or light-hearted humour. It also should be noted here that adoption problems may have been under reported in both categories – researchers may have worried that reporting this kind of information would make their system and field study “look like a failure”. It is plausible that they instead may have concentrated on reporting the positive aspects of uptake instead. Alternatively, they may simply not have considered it relevant to the analysis in their report. This critical analysis of the findings of Community Display field studies gives rise to a number of research questions. These are similar to those posed in the previous section, except here they refer to the specific nature of  on-going usage settings. 3a. How does usage progress and adapt over time?

2.6 Research Questions The research questions posed for this thesis are summarized below: 1. Understanding the phenomena of situated social behaviour around Community Displays a. What common phenomena of situated behaviour are observed across all the case studies? b. How are the social properties of the Community Display involved involved in these phenomena? c. How does this relate to the process of community adoption? 2. Understanding adoption in one-shot settings a. How do people progress from complete naivety of a Community Display to participation in related social activities and direct interaction with it? b. How does usage spread through the community? c. What are the implications for for design design to improve adoption? adoption? 3. Understanding adoption in on-going settings. a. How does usage progress and adapt over time? b. How does adoption spread through the community? c. How does the community appropriate the Community Display and how does it become integrated into community life? d. What are the implications implications for for design design to improve adoption? adoption?

2.7 Approach This thesis aims to address its research questions by using a range of  methods including ethnographically-informed observational studies, lab studies and the development and testing of prototypes in the field. These methods are utilized in a non-linear spiral design approach consisting of  “analyze-create-evaluate” “analyze-create-evaluate” cycles (Boehm, B. 1988). This approach has been found to be most suitable in designing for “wicked” problems of this nature (Rittel & Webber, Webber, 1973; 1973; Fitzpatrick, 2003). 2003). This section will detail the approach taken.

2.7.1 A Strategy for studying a young field As detailed previously, the Community Displays field is very young. At the outset of this thesis research in 2000, there was very little published work on Community Displays, and in particular a scarcity of research investigating

This research was therefore carried out in an iterative manner, drawing on the spiral design approach (Boehm, 1988), which defines the process as cycles of analysis, creation and evaluation, progressively leading to improved understanding and design. The critical analysis of contemporary research carried out in the previous sections of this chapter raised some questions about large displays in communal spaces in general, uncovered two common types of Community Display settings, “on-going” and “oneshot”, and pointed towards some key differences between the two in terms of the issues they face in voluntary adoption. These were therefore selected to be investigated in a series of case studies. This approach is called the “collective case study approach” (Stake, 2000), and it advocates the use of  multiple, heterogeneous cases, because they can lead to

“better 

understanding, perhaps better theorizing, about a still larger collection of  cases” (Stake, 2000; p. 437). Proponents of this approach also suggest it can

be used to suggest complexities for future investigations, and help establish

appropriate.   Any requirements identified would better be considered as provisional, being part of an iterative design   process, needing testing, prototyping and experimentation with various options and trade-offs identified by the analysis. ”

(p. 264, emphasis added)

Following this point, implications for design in this thesis are specified as “design suggestions” suggestions” rather than “recommendations”, “recommendations”, and are intended to be evaluated in future research, rather than to be considered the final word in design

for

Community

Displays.

This

approach

ties

back

into

conceptualising the design of Community Displays as a “wicked problem”, in which there is no single solution, and in which “ the problem is only understood progressively as solutions are developed” (Fitzpatrick et al.,

1996, p. 122)

Chapter 3 Studying the social nature of a large display in a communal space.

3.1 Introduction The case study reported in this chapter involves an initial investigation into the social properties of a large display when used in a communal space. Its contribution is to provide an underpinning understanding of the situated social interaction that takes place in its public interaction space, before the specific issue of the voluntary adoption of Community Displays is investigated in the following chapters. It would have been desirable to have begun this thesis research with a field study on an actual Community Display system in an authentic real world setting. However, at the time of  this research – early 2001 –the field was nascent, and these systems were not readily available. For example, the first conference workshop directly related to Community Displays was not held until November 2002 (O’Hara et al., 2002). Therefore, it was decided that grounding observational study would be carried out on another kind of physically large display in a similar

up an established, long term community who had been working together for at least a year. This chapter details an observational study of the AV team’s use of their large display, the prototyping of a digital alternative called “Wall-loader”, and a one-day field evaluation of this tool.

3.2 The Field Study

3.2.1 Method The study was carried out using a combination of ethnographicallyinformed observation, and contextual enquiry (cf. Agar, 1980; Holtzblatt & Beyer, 1996). The audio-visual team was observed for five days, three days being the actual conference, plus a day on either side where they undertook  administrative and transportation work. The team was shadowed for this

A team of twelve AV technicians from a company called “Audio-Visual Headquarters” were hired to deal with the delivery, installation and technical support of AV equipment for each session. This equipment included data projectors, projector screens, sound systems, mixers, microphones, video cameras, teleconferencing equipment, flip charts, and all the cables, splitters, cassettes and battery packs required for these items to function properly.

- The team The AV team consisted of 12 people. There was one team manager, who was in charge of booking the equipment and staff for each event. He was also the team’s official point-of-contact at the conference, and in charge of  making any financial decisions. The remaining 11 team members were technical support administrators. They were in charge of setting up the equipment and offering technical support to help out with problems as they

the team in scheduling equipment and technical support, which consisted of  a series of columns of A4 printed time-tables pinned to the walls. In front of  the large display was a shelf area on which various coloured pens and highlighters were stored.

(a) Equipment storage

(b) 2 way radios and tools

Pre-staging involved moving the correct equipment to the correct rooms at the right time, so that when the conference sessions started, the presenters or workshop organizers had the equipment that they requested. This was a tricky task, since the team was often short of equipment. For example, a typical strategy they used was to take a piece of equipment out of a room where it had been “pre-staged” but was not currently being used, and move it somewhere where it was needed immediately. They then later on needed to ensure that they replaced the missing item with an equivalent piece in time for the start of that session. This resulted in a complex “juggling” activity, akin to a critical-path analysis problem. Additional to this was the fact that equipment was spatially distributed through the floors of the building, which could create a lot of heavy carrying work. They therefore tried to minimize this by taking into account stairs and long distances. Often they would store heavy equipment in rooms on different floors for this reason. This created the problem of keeping track of their equipment,

“When you’re setting the show up, the people in the room, their communications are passed on to us, and then t hen we have to communicate back, trying to find out where the thing went wrong, and try to solve the problem. And that happens for about an hour period, generally starting about thirty minutes before the show. That’s kind of key… You kind of have to see the whole thing. Its like a theatre show. Half the folks in the house have no idea what it takes…”

Messages were transmitted from the session organizers to the team either via a student volunteer runner, the conference organizers office, or directly to an AV team member. They arrived either via radio, telephone or face-toface communication. If the message arrived already on a piece of paper, it would sometime be stuck up on the wall by the large display. The messages mainly consisted of equipment problems (e.g. malfunctions, usage problems), equipment requests (e.g. missing equipment, extra equipment needed) and occasionally requests to set up unscheduled events. During firefighting, equipment was often moved between rooms in an emergency,

organizer panicked at the beginning of the session because their wireless microphone was causing a buzzing sound. They then told everyone they could to pass on the message to the AV team: a student volunteer, the conference organizers, and also an AV team member. In such a situation when the team received the same message multiple times, they needed to engage in detective work to find out whether the reported problem was current and required attention (e.g. “Has it been solved previously?” “When and who by?”, “Has it re-occurred?”), as show in the following foll owing example: This quote involves people in three places: Sharon, a conference organizer, is located in the conference office. Abe and Ben are AV team members in the AV team’s office, while Rob, the AV team manager is roaming the floor of the conference. The people at the three locations converse with each other via radio. Sharon [conference organizer in conference centre over the radio]:

Yeah, Rob, we’re having some audio/visual problems in room 608, they said that there is a buzzing… Abe (technician in office speaks to Ben): Is that the room we

already fixed?

manager worked this into an initial schedule, drawing up four or five A4 tables for each day using Microsoft Excel™, printing them out and taping them up to the wall in vertical strips (one for each day) to make a large display (see figures 3.1d and 3.2). The font used was 12 point Arial, meaning that this text could be read only while standing directly in front of  it. Figure 3.2, below, shows how the large display was located in the corner of the room and was highly visible from all parts of the room. During each day, considerable effort was made to keep the information on the large display up to date, showing both the current state of affairs and the upcoming scheduled work. Team members constantly made amendments to it, which they did by hand using pencils, coloured pens or highlighters. At the end of each day, when sheets were typically very cluttered with annotations, the manager would consolidate the amendments and print out a new sheets to replace the current ones. During particularly busy periods, the information on the display became messy and disorganized looking,

The team was asked why they bothered with the extra work of printing, annotating and updating the large displays, when they could have avoided this by just using the digital version in Microsoft Excel on the laptop. They commented that it allowed them to scan-through all the schedules at a glance. For example, one day’s schedule typically spanned three A4 sheets, and they could look between them just using their eyes, rather than needing to scroll with the mouse. The manager also commented that this way he could easily see what changes had been made without needing to sit down in front of the laptop. They also jokingly commented that some of the team members might have trouble using Excel and make a mess of it for everyone else. Team members were observed to prefer to hold discussions around the large display, even though they had the capability to do so remotely, via two-way radio. One team member commented that that solving complex scheduling problems over the radio could be very difficult, and it was easier for everyone involved to see the timetable being worked

often requested it from passers-by. It was also observed that congregations often emerged in this way from a single user solving a problem, into three or four people working on a problem together in front of the display, discussing their ideas, gesturing to it and making amendments. A popular activity during quiet periods was to congregate around the display as a group, and try to re-plan the movement of equipment for the next session, so that the least amount of footwork would be required. Users of the display often used conspicuity in their annotations to grab their colleagues’ attention. Unsolved problems would be highlighted using fluorescent highlighter pens, by scrawling question marks and circles to draw attention to recent changes. In some cases extra sheets of paper would be stuck up by the large display. For example, in one case a team member was observed to stick an extra sheet of A4 paper up stating “Need 4 cameras for 302 PM session” in very large, bold writing, when they were unable to find any spare cameras according to the information on the large display.

3.2.3 Analysis of study findings This study confirms and extends many of the things already learned in section 2.3 concerning the inherent social properties of large displays. For example, the team chose to use the pin-and-paper large display instead of an adjacent laptop containing exactly the same information in a digital form, even though this required extra editing and transcription work. Analysis suggests that this was because it offered a number of other benefits which outweighed the cost of this work. The benefits the team members explicitly stated were that it provided “at a glance access”, overview of the timetables, and ease of use. These benefits have been observed in a number of other studies on large displays, such in Rogers and Bellotti’s (1997) newspaper publisher study, and Whittaker and Schwarz’s (1995) software developer study (detailed previously in Section 2.3). Further analysis of the participants’ behaviours reveals some other important phenomena relating to the nature of the way the large display was used.

such as national parks, that have attractive features which draw people to them like bees around honey (Johnston et al., 2000). Here, “honey-pot effect” is used to describe the phenomenon of the formation of social gatherings in the vicinity of the large display. The group was observed to prefer to converse about scheduling issues in front of the large display, rather than elsewhere or via two-way radio. This is directly related to the large display offering a shared point of reference – the team were able to look at the display together, gesture to it, and talk in reference to it (e.g. “What about moving that there?”). As discussed in Section 2.3.3, prior research has found that shared points of reference improve the quality of communication (Fussell et al., 2000; Veinott et al., 1999; Whittaker, 1997; Nardi & Whittaker, 1993). Particularly interesting was the way groups spontaneously formed in the vicinity of the large display. This involved the public availability of  usage of  the large display – team members could “oversee” their colleagues using

However, as well as offering important benefits which gave the large display a key role in their work activities, the paper-based nature of the large display also caused them problems, since editing of annotations involved crossings-out, arrows and re-writing, which became confusing during peak times. This meant that equipment sometimes became lost or deployed to the wrong rooms at the wrong times, and the team often held conversations trying to work out what was written down. While they aggregated the edits and re-printed the timetables every night, this could not be done during the day since it was too time-consuming ti me-consuming.. This is an inherent shortcoming of paper – it does not offer support for editing and re-arrangement of information in the same way that computer technology does (Moran et al., 1999). With this shortcoming in mind, it was decided that an interactive large display prototype would be developed, to address this problem while attempting to maintain the benefits of the paper display. The following sections detail this work.

centered design attention. A number of different formats were experimented with, using “quick and dirty” user testing on paper-based prototypes, including “Chernoff faces” (Chernoff, 1973). This is reported in detail in Rogers and Brignull (2002). The aim was to design a representational format that allowed to easily interpret the current state of affairs (the “fires”), and to decide which needed immediate attention. A suitable representational format for displaying the “fires” was found to be a Gantt chart representation, since it allowed effective parallel visual comparison between the items (cf. Rogers et al., 2002; Rogers & Brignull, 2003).

3.3.1 Wall-loader prototype system description The Wall-loader can be described as an interactive Gantt chart. Along the horizontal axis are a series of columns representing the different locations (e.g. room numbers), while the vertical axis represents time elapsed, which counts down to the deadline, at which time all the problems should be

Figure 3.3: Photo of Wall-loader in use

70

Figure 3.4: Two snapshots showing part of the Wall-loader display. Technician icons are superimposed on problem boxes as part of a chart, with location and time elapsed as i ts axes

71

3.3.2 Wall-loader Field evaluation The Wall-loader prototype was taken to the same AV team at a conference the following year (CHI 2002), for them to evaluate the system and give detailed feedback about it. The participants were the same nine core team members, with three three different temporary staff. Since Wall-loader Wall-loader was only a prototype, they were not asked to use it to actually carry out their work at the conference. Instead, the system was set up in their office as a large projected wall display running from a laptop and data projector, and the group were given a 40 minute demonstration which detailed the interactive features of the system. Following this, they were interviewed as a group for half an hour, and then individual interviews were carried out consecutively through the course of the day, each for a duration of approximately 15 minutes. Although they were very positive about the storyboards, this faceto-face evaluation revealed some important reasons why Wall-loader was not suitable for their use.

display estate of an average desktop computer monitor (1024 by 768 pixels: note that display estate resolution is independent from physical size). Therefore if Wall-loader were to attempt to display as much information as their pin-and-paper large display, it would need to offer a navigation technique such as scrolling, which would require lengthier interactions from the users and would remove the “at a glance” quality of the display. One problem of Wall-loader was its bulkiness: since it used a data projector, it had a large footprint. As soon as the demonstration was finished, the team packed it away to make space for their work, so that it would not interrupt the flow of people through the space. Future re-designs could benefit from considering the proportions of the destination space and the way it is used, to select the most suitable large display technology to fit that space. More compact alternatives to front projection include rear projection using mirrors, LCD screens, plasma screens, or other forthcoming technologies (such as electronic ink™ or OLED displays).

another way, this flexibility could be described as allowing the community to appropriate the tool and devise their own style of using it, which may not be exactly how the designer originally conceptualized it (cf. Dourish, 2003). Wall-loader overly constrained their use of the display, and prevented this from happening.

3.4 Discussion Findings from this field evaluation confirm many of the things already known about the social properties of large displays, including their support of information dissemination, awareness, serendipity, and provision of a shared point of reference for co-present group interactions. This chapter has described how these properties were effectively exploited by a team of  locally mobile technicians using a large display to support their work. A key finding from this case study is that interaction with a large display in

coordinating group gatherings, resulting from the public availability of the display and the interaction in its vicinity. The prototyping and evaluation of Wall-loader served to further furt her reveal some important aspects of the beneficial nature of their “low tech” pin-and-paper large display, which would need to be reproduced in some way if a digital alternative were to be effective. Specifically, their low tech pin-and-paper large display was extremely easy to learn, since it used familiar physical media – alterations were done using pen and sheets, and could be added or swapped using push-pins. This was particularly useful for the temporary staff members who had only a small amount of training time before being thrown into the job. Also, rapidity of use was found to be an important property, facilitated by the high resolution of the pin-and-paper display which allowed “scan reading” rather than needing users to scroll, turn pages or otherwise navigate through the information bit by bit; a finding that is confirmed by empirical research into screen resolution and reading speed

Chapter 4 The adoption of a Community Display in a one-shot setting.

4.1 Introduction The type of one-shot setting selected to be studied in this chapter is a social gathering event – specifically, a party. Other similar one-shot events occur at conferences, trade-shows and festivals. These are unlike gatherings that occur at familiar venues, such as a local pub or workplace common room, because they are special one-off events. The event is short, typically ranging from a few hours to a day long, the venue is typically borrowed (e.g. a conference center), and when it finishes, the visitors may never return to the same venue again. Community members often come together from remote places for the duration of the event, making up a composition of friends, colleagues, “familiar strangers” (Milgram, 1992) and unfamiliar strangers. The event provides them with the ability to meet other community members in person for the first time t ime or to maintain existing relationships. Activities at the event may involve learning (e.g. watching presentations,

The findings of the previous chapter show the way a social gathering can emerge around a large display and facilitate social congregation and interaction, without the need for planning activities (the “honey-pot effect”). This suggests that Community Displays may be useful in supporting socializing activities. Unlike the large display investigated in the previous chapter which was used for work activities, adoption of a Community Display is voluntary. As detailed in Chapter 2, the voluntary adoption of  Community Displays is the core concern of this thesis. This chapter aims to ascertain the role of situated social interaction in voluntary adoption within a one-shot setting. Drawing on the findings of the previous chapter, the concepts of flow and the honey-pot effect will be used as an analytical frame and expanded upon within this context.

4.2 Supporting the activity of socializing

their personal social networks for information, work and favours, and thus they play a very important role in their work lives. Nardi et al. (2000) state “The old adage, "It's not what you know, but who you know," could,  paradoxically, be the motto for the Information Age.” (p. 1) Social capital

theory, described earlier (Section 2.2) suggests that people keep track of the favours and good-will they pass on to each other, and draw upon it in a manner akin to trade. Therefore building and maintaining a personal social network is an activity of high value, even though it can involve apparently frivolous socializing activities. One of the problems for an attendee trying to meet new people at a social gathering event is when the attendee is a new arrival to the gathered community, and is not well linked within the social network. This means that the attendee has to start conversations with strangers “in the cold”, rather than being able to meet them via introductions through existing colleagues. This activity can be difficult, and can hinder a person’s

developed in recent years for this purpose, which fall under the banner of  “social software” (Tepper, 2003). For example, during 2004 alone, over 100 web-based “social networking” and “friend of a friend” services have appeared, such as Friendster™ and Orkut™, which enable people to make new acquaintances on-line by being able to view and correspond with their friends’ friends (Boyd, 2004). With the emergence of mobile technologies such as WAP and MMS on mobile phones, a number of similar mobile services have emerged, such as Jabberwocky (Paulos & Goodman, 2004), MamJam™ and Dodgeball™, which enable people to discover if friends are nearby (e.g. in the same area of town) and meet up with them, or to meet new people with shared interests who happen to be co-located (e.g. in the same café). Other bespoke mobile technologies offer similar services, such as nTag™, SpotMe™, and in the research domain, Intellibadge (Cox et al., 2003) and Thinking Tags (Borovoy et al., 1998). At the outset of this work (early 2002), only a small amount of research had

4.3: Designing a Community Display to support socializing in a one-shot setting Drawing upon the analysis of the nature of socializing in Section 4.2, the problem of supporting socializing between strangers was selected to be explored through the prototyping of a system called “Opinionizer”. This was another use of the vertical prototyping approach, in which a prototype is designed to support one aspect of a problem in a fully functioning manner. Socializing between strangers is also a particularly important aspect of the problems of socializing, since strangers do not have the linkage of  common colleagues or friends. Section 4.2 shows that it is crucial for people to establish common ground when attempting to hold a conversation (Clark, 1996; Borovoy et al., 1998). As such, “establishment of common ground” was taken to be a motivation for this Community Display’s functionality. Specifically, the Community Display was designed to provide a publicly available surface displaying topical themes for discussion, and the means

•

Low effort interaction: ensure that interaction involves minimal

effort and time from users (McCarthy, 2004; Cox et al., 2003) •

Content relevancy: ensure that the content is interesting to the

gathered community (Agostini, 2002) These initial design suggestions were taken on board and used in the specification and development of the following system, which was coded using Macromedia Director™.

4.4 Opinionizer System Description The Opinionizer system provides a large publicly available surface for the capture and display of community members’ opinions on topical themes. It is composed of a large projected display, controlled by a single laptop. The interaction model can be described as follows: a large title along the top of  the screen suggests a topical theme to which users are invited to post up a

Figure 4.1: A screen shot from Opinionizer taken at the book launch party (study 1)

4.5.1 Study 1: The Book Launch Event - The Study Setting The setting of this study was an evening book launch party during the CHI 2002 conference, located in a large room at the top floor of the Minneapolis Hilton Hotel. The room was octagonal, and offered a long buffet t able, eight round tables with chairs (seating for 48 people) and a bar. The Opinionizer Community Display was set up on a raised platform next to the bar, as depicted in Figure 4.2.

their way to and from the bar). Opinionizer was deployed for the full 2 hour duration of the party. Activities were observed and observational observational notes were taken. Video was not used since the event organizers expressed privacy concerns.

- Observations At the beginning of the party, the first people to arrive tended to congregate near the buffet table, a few meters from the Opinionizer screen (in the centre of the room). This left an empty space around Opinionizer. At this point, few people came forward to try out the Opinionizer, and when people were invited to come over and try it out, they seemed rather shy of doing so. Fake opinions were added by the researcher to encourage interaction. However, this alone did not seem to encourage usage.

looking at it, gesturing, laughing) without actually interacting with it, as shown in Figure 4.3 above. The congregation seemed to create a honey-pot effect as found in the previous chapter, whereby the more people who interacted with it, the more other people followed suit. This seemed to result in an increase in rate of contributions to the Opinionizer over time, as shown in Figure 4.4 – the comments began spaced out, and progressed to be closer together as the event wore on (Total number of contributions: 38. Data gathered from system log).

Figure 4.4: Timeline showing incidence of participation (in seconds). Dots represent comments, vertical lines represent theme changes.

As time passed, it was observed that people were able to interact with the Opinionizer without needing any explanation from the helper, either

with different themes, intended to be more relevant for the community of  newly starting postgraduate students at Sussex University. An example was “What do you think of the food at Sussex University?” The projection screen was the same size, with the same legible and visible distances (legible from approximately 16’, visible from anywhere in the room, occlusion from crowding not withstanding). As shown in figures 4.5 and 4.6 overleaf, the room was a different shape, being rectangular. Approximately 150 people passed through the space during the study. Several had met before and formed groups but there was a sizeable number of people who were there by themselves. The party lasted for about five hours, with the Opinionizer active for the first two and a half of those. Two video cameras were deployed near the display to record group behaviours and track  people’s movement. They were placed high up to be unobtrusive as possible, so as not to affect people’s behaviours. As well as video recording, two assistants helped capture other data: one person was employed as a

Figure 4.6: Floor-plan of the set-up at the welcome party

- Observations Similar to the book launch event, at the beginning of the party people congregated some distance away from the Opinionizer, collecting food and beverages from other tables. One person commented, later "Nobody really knew what it was when they came in and there was a whole kind of fear 

In total, out of approximately approximately 150 people who passed passed through the space during the study, approximately 60 interacted with Opinionizer, i.e. 40% (deduced from system logs). During the study, 23 people were interviewed (see appendix 1 for questions), selected at random from the room to gain a cross section of people who had used and had not used Opinionizer (mean age 29; 14 males, 9 females). Over half of those interviewed made positive comments about Opinionizer, and stated that they felt comfortable socializing around it and talking with others about the opinions displayed. Over three-quarters of respondents stated that they had socialized with people they hadn’t previously met while standing near Opinionizer. Hence, it proved to be a highly effective ice-breaker. The negative comments from the interviewees mainly centered around social awkwardness which they experienced in taking part. To quote one interviewee “I was definitely aware of other people watching, which made it  kind of awkward”. In fact, over half of the users interviewed reported that

bring down the tone of the comments, and encourage facetious or even offensive comments. One participant interestingly commented: “It's  perhaps safer [to input remotely] but not all the fun f un of going round the table together".

4.6 Analysis of findings This section is based on an analysis of the findings of both studies. In observing people’s behaviour in relation to the Community Display, it was found that behaviours could be classified into three types of activities: peripheral awareness activities, focal awareness activities and direct interaction activities. These can be summarized as follows, below: A. Peripheral awareness activities: Typically eating, drinking and socializing elsewhere at the party. In general, people in these activity spaces are peripherally aware of the display’s presence and do not

People would often then move to “focal awareness” activities. This involved standing in view of the Community Display, looking at it i t in more detail, and socializing with people in relation to it (e.g. having conversations about the displayed themes or comments). To quote one interviewee from study two: “I didn’t see people using it at first, but I did see people standing around it  so I stood beside and watched it for a while”. Transition from peripheral

awareness to focal awareness activities would often take place when other conversations had finished, and people were apparently looking for something interesting to occupy themselves with. Also, people who arrived at the event alone often progressed into focal awareness activities on their own, and were observed to often engage with others who also were looking at the Community Display.

observed where the adding of an opinion was cooperative and where different individuals took turns to be “the driver” and enter data via the keyboard. People engaging in direct interaction activities typically had an audience, who were watching their interaction. As stated in the introduction of this chapter, one of the aims in developing the Opinionizer Community Display was to facilitate a honey-pot effect, in which people were attracted to congregate and socialize in its vicinity. The results of the two Opinionizer studies show that this aim was successful. During the course of both studies, there was a progressive increase in the number of people in the immediate vicinity of the Opinionizer, where a “buzz” of socializing conversations occurred. By standing in this space and showing an interest (e.g. visibly facing the screen or reading the text), people seemed to give a tacit signal to others that they were open to discussion and interested in meeting new people. As expected, the displayed information was used as common ground to strike up and hold

“multifocused” in nature (p. 91). The flow of people in the space can be described as mingling, whereby people moved between “foci”, i.e. clusters and resources such as food and refreshments (rather than moving directly in and out of the communal space as in the AV team case study). As well as this mingling, a flow was observed in the movement of people towards and away from the Community Display. In the previous case study of the AV team, a physical bottleneck occurred in the space due to the large footprint of the Wall-loader large display, which created a blockage in the flow of people to the extent that they removed Wall-loader from the communal space. In the Opinionizer studies, no such physical bottlenecks were observed owing to the large size of the spaces. However, what can be described as “psychological bottlenecks” were uncovered in study 2: all of the interviewees who did not try Opinionizer also had negative conceptions about the experience of using it. A specific issue was social awkwardness – a phenomenon seen in other studies of 

interact with a Community Display system. Also, given the many other foci of activity (other conversation circles, food and drink tables, etc), the Community Display is in direct competition for the attendee’s time. The issue of queuing could be remedied by allowing multiple input points, e.g. via SMS text message using mobile phones, a suggestion to which interviewees in the second study were generally receptive. However, this would make input remote and diffused, and therefore would lessen the honey-pot effect the system is seeking to achieve. It would be interesting to consider how multiple input points could be situated within the Community Display’s public interaction space to reduce the one-by-one queuing, and make the input itself into a more sociable activity, since users were often observed attempting to input as a group, crowding around the keyboard and mouse together and taking turns with them.

4.7 Discussion

it. These thresholds are defined here as the “threshold to attention” and the “threshold to interaction”. These concepts of flow, activities and thresholds make up a model of interaction with the Community Display, as shown in the schematic diagram in Figure 4.9, overleaf. The term threshold is used here in a psychological rather than physical or spatial sense. Psychological “hurdles” seem to occur at these two thresholds, with notable differences in their nature.

system while they are involved in another activity, such as conversing with other people. Then, having chosen to, they will give the display more attention, and perhaps move to stand in a position with a clearer view. Once they are attending to the Community Display, they may then cross the threshold to interaction, deciding whether to actually interact with the Community Display. Essentially, the two thresholds represent two levels of  granularity of detail. At the threshold to attention, the person will judge the system based on the broad-grained details available to them at a distance and from brief glances, essentially asking themselves “Is it worth taking a closer look?”. Then, at the threshold to interaction, the person has

committed to spend some time and effort finding out more about the Community Display. Here they will be able to discover more fine-grained details, such as “vicariously” learning the details of interaction with the system by observing others using it (Reber & Reber, 2001), including the length of the interaction, and exactly what the system does and the benefits

Similar strategies are also used by shopping psychologists in placing information displays, advertisements and plinths in shops (e.g. Underhill 2002). At this broad-grained stage, an aesthetic “wow factor” seemed to be an effective way of drawing the interest of potential users. A number of  participants commented that they noticed the novel graphical appearance of  the Opinionizer display – consisting of kitsch cartoon characters, photographic centerpieces and colourful concentric rings. Even though it may seem superficial, this aesthetic wow factor seemed to serve the important function of enticing passers-by to ask themselves “ What is that?  I’d like to find out more.” However, following this is the threshold to direct

interaction, which consists of a different set of design issues. Having decided to pay attention to the Community Display, the user will t hen aim to find out some of the fine-grained details about the system. Vicarious learning, i.e. learning by observing others (Reber & Reber, 2001),

currency which they will only spend if they see themselves benefiting over and above the other alternative things they can “spend” it on, such as conversing with other people elsewhere in the social gathering. This model of interaction shows how people move between different activities in relation to a Community Display and suggests the kind of  information a person needs to acquire if they are to be encouraged to cross the different thresholds. Consequently, this chapter has gone some distance in clarifying the nature of social behaviour in relation to a Community Display, showing the stages which users go through towards adoption, and revealing some important implications for designers of Community Displays for one-shot settings.

Chapter 5 Designing a Community Display for on-going usage settings

5.1 Introduction The previous chapter investigated the nature of adoption and usage of a Community Display in one-shot “social gathering event” settings, uncovering some pertinent design issues. This chapter will present the design process carried out on Dynamo, a Community Display for on-going usage settings, i.e. places like workplace common rooms and coffee areas, or public cafes and recreation venues which have regular patrons. Voluntary adoption problems in on-going usage settings are different in nature to those in one-shot usage settings, such as those reported in the Opinionizer studies. Rather than being a foreign and temporary artefact, when adopted in an ongoing usage setting a Community Display can go on to become integrated into community life, and involved in social activities, norms and practices. This on-going process of adoption is often referred to as “appropriation”, as defined by Torpel et al. (2003):

For example, Agostini et al. (2002, p. 711) describe Community Wall users as having re-invented the Community Display during a longitudinal field study. They observed that since the system did not provide search facilities in Italian (the national language at the deployment site), users found this frustrating. Through time, members of the user community took on the role of “Italian search engine” using their own knowledge to help others to search for information and to suggest related items (p. 701). Also, Churchill et al. (2004) found that in a 14-month study of Plasma Poster, social norms started to emerge that specified the styles of acceptable use, community members were observed to complain about when broken. These implicit rules share a parallel with explicit rules such as FAQs or “codes of practice” often used by established virtual communities, such as USENET or web discussion boards (Preece, 2000). As well as social norms, emergent social activities can also give rise to practices – these are activities which become established and understood customs within a community (Torpel et al.,

session to review its suitability, and in a laboratory study, to test its userinterface and interaction models. The findings of these studies are then used to recommend some iterative re-designs for the system, which were integrated into Dynamo Version 2 (V2).

5.2 Informing the design of Dynamo As detailed in the preface, the Dynamo Community Display is the product of an EPSRC funded group project of the same name, which this thesis research

contributed

towards.

Technical

infrastructure

design

and

implementation work was carried out by other parties on the group project – see Izadi et al. (2003) for details. An initial set of technical goals were derived from workshop meetings between members of the Dynamo project group. For example, the computer scientists on the project were motivated

Izadi et al. (2003) detail and expand greatly upon these principles and their underpinning motivations.

5.2.1 User experience principles for on-going settings This section puts forward some user-experience principles for Community Displays in on-going settings, with a view to encouraging voluntary adoption, i.e. appropriation, as it is referred to in these settings. These are derived from the literature review and an analysis of the findings of the previous case studies. A short description of how these should be applied in the design of Dynamo is also put forward. It is acknowledged that each proposed design “solution” that is drawn out of a user experience principle is but one possibility in a multitude of others in the design space: this is the difficulty of designing for “Wicked Problems” Problems” (cf Fitzpatrick et al., 1996; as detailed in Section 2.7.3).

various media types and annotate them in different ways (e.g. via web interface or touchscreen). Again, this could be used in any number of ways, depending on what the community themselves choose to use it for. For example, it could be used to display a firm’s stock and productivity figures in the foyer area for clients to see. Alternatively, it could be used to display humour and jokes for socializing in a less public shared kitchen area. Although the functionality is the same, the social role given to the Community Display is very different. In comparison, Community Displays for one-shot settings can be described as offering relatively simple and inflexible functions. For example, in Proactive Displays (McCarthy, 2003), Agent Salon (Sumi and Masse, 2001), Palimpsest (Agamanolis, 2003) (reviewed in sections 2.4 and 2.5), the designers seem to aim to constrain and guide users into engaging in certain social activities, with the apparent aim of short-cutting the process of  appropriation so it can fit into the limited time scale available, to encourage

learned about Opinionizer. Drawing upon this, it is suggested that Dynamo should offer a visual user interface that is easily observable by onlookers, to facilitate the vicarious learning process. For example, keyboard shortcuts and small gesture-based commands will be avoided, and instead iconic palette based interfaces will be used.

- Build upon familiar interaction models To speed the learning process and encourage uptake, it is suggested that familiar interaction models should be built upon, rather than designing completely new styles of interaction. Thus it can be recommended that keyboard and and drag-and-drop interaction interaction within a WIMP (Windows-Icons(Windows-IconsMenus-Pointers) user interface should be used, so that users do not have to re-learn the means to achieve basic interactions. This contrasts with other more experimental interaction techniques used elsewhere in i nteractive large displays, such as iRoom’s “flow menu” (Guimbretire et al., 2001) or

of acquiring a particular type – the findings of the Opinionizer studies suggest that requirement of time and effort can outweigh the perceived benefits of the system and deter people from using it. Furthermore, some community members may not even own a personal device, and if they do, they may not carry them at all times. The system should be inclusive to such people since they are potential users. In summary, a wide range of personal devices will be supported in order to not exclude any potential users. Furthermore, personal devices will be conceptualized as an optional benefit, rather than a pre-requisite to interaction with Dynamo.

- Encourage a honey-pot effect As shown in the AV and Opinionizer case studies, the honey-pot effect is a useful phenomenon which can facilitate social congregation and interaction around a large display without the need for planning activities, and it therefore should be encouraged and supported. It has been postulated that

It was also hoped that simultaneous multi-user interaction will allow openended and flexible range of group uses. For example, a single small group could gather round and each of them have a mouse and keyboard. Alternatively, individuals could arrive alone, and use the Community Display independently, or in pairs (etc). Or instead, a group of 12 people could gather in the room, and congregate in groups of four, with one mouse and keyboard on each table, among many other possibilities. In other words, this interactional and spatial flexibility could provide new opportunities for social use, and thus encourage a honey-pot effect.

- Support the scaling and arrangement of media The AV team case study showed how team members often highlighted text, and used large text sizes to draw attention to particular items on their large display. This served an important function of disseminating information to passers-by at a distance, and also of indicating the recency and importance

norms and practices. For example, participants in the AV team knew when it was and was not appropriate to alter someone else’s annotations on the large display. Also, participants in the Opinionizer study tended not to manipulate other people’s comments, because they knew it was not socially appropriate. Recent research in the area also implies support for this user experience principle – for example, in Dix et al.’s (2004) user studies of the “Hermes” situated door display (for the booking of shared rooms in an office environment), they found that abuse of the open-access model tended not to occur, because on-lookers provided a function of “neighborhood watch”, to quote: “…the public setting of a situated display acts as a resource for security. The very publicness creates a social auditability that prevents certain kinds of abuse.” (p.1)

Similarly, O’Hara et al. (2004), in user studies of another similar office door display system, found that:

5.3 Dynamo Version 1 System Description Drawing upon the project group’s technical goals and the user experience principles put forward in the previous section, the Dynamo system was designed and implemented. It should be emphasized that the resultant system is just one instance of many systems that could potentially have been created on the basis of these goals and principles: it is exploratory research. From a user-centric viewpoint, the Dynamo system is composed of three parts, depicted in Figure 5.1 overleaf. Summarized below, these are detailed in the following subsections: •

The Dynamo display surface: a large shared wall display, typically

composed of a plasma or projected screen •

The interaction points: keyboard and mouse pairs, or laptops, which

are used for multi-user interaction •

The device hub: a USB (or Firewire) hub where users’ mobile devices

Figure 5.1: Schematic diagram of the Dynamo system

110

5.3.1 The Dynamo Display Surface In summary, the overall function of Dynamo is to provide a large visual surface which supports a range of display, sharing and exchange functions, and allows the interconnection of a variety of personal devices and media types. To reiterate some of the ways in which it can be appropriated, it may be used as a noticeboard, a presentation screen, a surface for group “show and tell” activities, for exchanging files, for browsing the web and multimedia in groups, and generally, providing a shared point of reference for conversational support. Dynamo is a multi-user system, allowing simultaneous interaction from multiple simultaneous users, via keyboards and mice. Users’ cursors are colour coded, and their personal icons are displayed whenever appropriate to allow them to easily identify each other on the surface. Multi-user access to windows is optimistic (in Dynamo V1) and relies on social negotiation between the co-present users. For example, all windows can be manipulated

“mobile” interaction point if they wish. In a normal set up, three base interaction points are provided. Any combination of base and mobile interaction points can be used. Additional interaction points can be added (or taken away) at any time during usage. A base interaction point is a mouse & keyboard pair, typically wireless, which any user can pick up and employ to interact with the Dynamo. Each mouse & keyboard is connected to a Windows™ PC (typically hidden from view) which is running the Dynamo Telepointer Application. This application sends mouse and keyboard events to the Dynamo Display Server. If a user has a laptop which they can put on the Local Area Network (via a wired or wireless connection), they are able to run the Dynamo Laptop Application. This allows the desktop of the users’ laptop to tile with the Dynamo surface, so that when a user moves their mouse to the top of the screen, it appears on the Dynamo surface as a colour-coded pointer. Users

USB Flash Drive (termed “Pen Drive”). Designed to be held on a keyring, these devices serve as small storage devices. They plug directly into a USB port without requiring a cable. MP3 Player: Player: Many serve the double function of music playback and audio recording. Digital Still Camera: Camera : Many have the capability for recording video and audio clips as well as still photos. Multimedia Jukebox: This new genre of device are for storage, vie wing and playback of multimedia, including video, images and audio. Smart Phone: Phone: Among other features, these devices offer a range of digital photo and video capture, music playback, document editing and storage. PDA: As with smart phones, many PDAs have capabilities for taking photographs, video, audio, document editing and storage. Windows Laptop: When connected via LAN and running the Dynamo Laptop Application, the user is able to drag and drop media to and from their desktop and the Dynamo surface.

Figure 5.2: Dynamo Compatible Devices

5.4.1 Feedback Session In order to gain user feedback on the system, Dynamo V1 was deployed at a small conference for computer scientists for the duration of one day. Since the user group were expert computer users, it was hoped that they would be able to articulate their feedback better than average end users. This made it a type of “expert evaluation” session (Bias & Mayhew, 1994).

- Study Setting Dynamo V1 was deployed in the foyer area of the hotel at which the conference was being held. A diagram of the floor plan is shown in Figure 5.3a below, and a photo of the layout is shown in Figure 5.3b, overleaf.

Figure 5.3b: Annotated photograph of the system layout

The system configuration involved a single SXGA projector used as the Dynamo display (approx. 2.5m wide by 2m tall, positioned approx. 1m above ground), with two base interaction points, composed of two pairs of  wireless keyboards and mice, and one mobile interaction point, consisting of  a laptop connected via Wireless LAN.

approximately 30 interacted with the system; some as individuals and others in small groups, while others watched. Some users commented that they felt “on stage” or under the spotlight. One commented, “I hope I don’t break it  in front of everyone”. This social awkwardness and apprehension of using

technology for the first time in front of an audience is consistent with the analysis made on the Opinionizer studies in Chapter 4 (cf. Rogers & Brignull, 2003). Users were questioned on their feelings about the ability to simultaneously interact on Dynamo. Respondents almost unanimously considered this to be beneficial and sociable, to quote one interviewee: “It’s more sociable than using laptops around a table” , while another stated “ Instead of being a back  seat driver we can have two front seat drivers!” and yet another stated “...   you can just give something to someone by just dragging… [Gestures]  Bang! I think that’s important”. Also, a honey-pot effect was observed to

occur on some occasions, whereby conference delegates would go and join

application or a compromising photo which he would not have wanted his colleagues to see. Reflecting on this complaint, it becomes obvious that there is a mismatch between ownership rights in the real world, in which personal device contents are private and are physically held out of reach from intruders (e.g. in a bag or the user’s hands), and ownership rights on the Dynamo surface, in which anyone can access any device that is connected and any window that is displayed. While this open access approach was devised to provide a simple, easy and rapid-to-use interface, it is clear that the contents of  personal devices may be considered private, and that people may not be willing to rely on social protocol to prevent abuse. Indeed, accidental misuse is a risk, as in the example above, where a colleague may open a file expecting it to be an item acceptable to display publicly, and then finding it is not. Furthermore, owing to the fact that it is a large publicly visible display potentially being watched by on-lookers, the risk is not just of theft

study, they were given a consent form, explaining that participation was voluntary, the data collected was confidential, they could ask any questions they liked, and that they were free to leave at any time without needing to give a reason. Participants were paid £5 each.

- Study design The given task involved the group creating an “interactive poster” on the Dynamo surface, effectively preparing it to be a community noticeboard for a hypothetical community who would use the space. This involved them browsing through and choosing media from a mixed selection which they were each given on different pen-drives as they arrived at the study. Each participant’s selection was mixed in terms of relevance, aesthetics and physical proportions, to engender discussion and decision-making. The task  was to spatially arrange the media on the Dynamo surface, with the option of creating text and of displaying web pages if they wished. The scenario

was placed on the desktop of the laptop, allowing the laptop user to drag and drop this material onto the Dynamo surface. Each session lasted 45 minutes. Before each session, 15 minutes were spent talking the users through a detailed set of instructions explaining how to use the system. Users were seated at two tables arranged in a wide “V” shape in front of the Dynamo display, to allow users to be able to easily look at each other and Dynamo. They were videoed from two angles – one camera was pointed at the group, to record their physical physical behaviours, while another another was pointed at the Dynamo display, to record their behaviour on screen. A still of t he video capture set-up is shown in Figure 5.4. After the sessions, participants were debriefed and interviewed about their experience of using Dynamo.

manipulating each others’ windows and working in each others’ space. This section will detail these findings (also reported in more detail in Izadi et al., 2003). In general, when users started out using Dynamo, many of them had difficulties in understanding the etiquette of using the communal surface. Some users were very polite and asked the group before they opened any documents on the public surface, while others were more forward and dominated the display estate with less regard for others’ needs. Once they became more familiar with Dynamo, users often helped each other and worked together without using much discussion about how to cooperate using the interface. This is shown in Vignette 5.1, below, where “P” and “R” assist “L” who is having trouble grabbing and moving a window containing a photo of an old lady from an overlapping pile of windows:

Vignette 5.1:

J: Oh sorry R, Did I? R: That was mine that was! J: Oops! I do beg your pardon! Vignette 5.3: H: See I can’t move your thing, look! M: You can... H grabs his window while he is talking and moves it while M

is trying to use it M: [angrily] No! M [resizes his window to cover H’s] H: Oi! [He grabs the offending window and moves it out of 

his way]

To quote one user in the debriefing interview: “I think it’s actually quite chaotic unless you work to some sort of plan, because basically it’s like having a desktop but harder because you can’t control it, you know, and  when you put something there, somebody’s going to put something over  what you’ve just put down.” Even though they were trying to cooperate,

display, i.e., the real estate and the media items, to avoid conflicts between users, particularly during periods of intensive use. This requirement created a tension with the original user experience principle of “allowing open access to all resources” in order to keep the interaction with the system simple and thus facilitate learning and adoption (detailed in Section 5.2.1). In other words, how could the system be kept simple to use for first-time and novice users while also providing these additional features of access control, which would add complexity to the system? The following subsections detail how this tension was addressed in the redesign of  Dynamo, i.e. version 2 (V2).

- Ownership of personal devices In order to implement ownership of personal devices without complicating

access control rules (Specifically, the case studies in Chapters 3 and 4; Dix et al., 2004; O’Hara et al., 2004). Furthermore, an “open access” model enabled the system to be easier to learn and use, and for this reason such a model was designed into Dynamo V1. However, the laboratory study reported in Section 5.4.3 shows that during intensive group usage, conflicts between users became highly evident, in the t he form of accidental overlapping, closing or stealing each others’ windows or space. In order to address the tension between providing ease of use while also providing a means of  access control, facilities for access control were designed to be optional, defaulting to the open access model for first time and novice users, while offering advanced access control features via registration for those users who desired them. In addition, the screen real-estate was re-designed to be significantly larger, as detailed in section 5.5 and figure 5.6. The mechanisms for access control designed for Dynamo V2 were called “Carving”, and “Parcels”, inspired from other multi-user systems. For

5.5 Dynamo Version 2: System Description This section describes the changed and additional features introduced into Version 2. Repetition of the unchanged features stated in Section 5.3 is avoided for the sake of brevity. A detailed video demonstrating the features of Dynamo Version 2, is available in Izadi et al., (2003b). Figure 5.5 overleaf shows screen shot of the system in use. Following this section, “Dynamo V2” will generally be referred to as just “Dynamo”, for the purpose of brevity.

Figure 5.5: Screenshot of the Dynamo (V2) system in use

125

- Increased screen estate Dynamo V2 allows a Dynamo surface to be spread across multiple screens, the default being two tiled side-by-side (although theoretically offering any configuration, and as many screens as the server’s hardware can support), This offers substantially more screen estate for simultaneous interaction and the concurrent display of media on the surface, as shown in Figure 5.6.

Figure 5.6: comparing the screen estate size of Dynamo V.1 with the intended size of Dynamo V.2

chosen interaction point (wireless mouse and keyboard) as owned by that user. Non registered users are able to use the system at any time as anonymous “guest” users. Unlike registered users, any window they open is publicly accessible, and they are not able to create or belong to any carveregions (see later for details), since the system cannot identify them as unique individuals.

- Personal and public palettes Users access the available communal resources as icons on a shared public palette which is located at the top of the screen. These include services, such as a web browser and annotation tool, and any shared or unregistered devices, as shown in Figure 5.5. Registered users have their own personal palettes (see Figure 5.7), which appear when they plug in their personal device, located in a row on the bottom of the screen. Personal palettes are identified by colour code, together with the user’s icon, which they choose

- Addressable Parcels Parcels provide users users with a means of storing media on the dynamo dynamo surface for future access. Parcels are like “folders” seen in normal GUI environments (such as Microsoft Windows™), except that they have an inbuilt and readily accessible visual access control tool. Parcels have two states – iconic and open. When iconic, a parcel is shown as a parcel icon (shown as either “sealed” or “previously opened”, as depicted in Figure 5.8), and has a textual label. When open, a parcel is shown as a media viewer window, which allows users to view the contents of the parcel and open each item. It also offers facilities for setting access control, sealing the parcel, and deletion. An access control pane offers simply a list of registered users, which can be selected via the mouse, as well the option to make the parcel “public”, i.e. publicly accessible by any user.

right of the carve, and dropping it onto the target user’s personal icon on their personal palette. This causes the joining user’s icon to appear with the owner’s in the top left of the carve, as depicted in Figure 5.10, overleaf. Access can be provided for users who are not present at the time by putting the carve’s key icon into a parcel and addressing addressing it to them. Access can be revoked by dragging their personal icon out of the carve and dropping it onto the Dynamo surface. A user who does not have access is shown this by their cursor developing a “shield” icon around it, as depicted with the green cursor in the red carve region, in Figure 5.9. A carve region can be discarded by clicking the “discard” button in the bottom left of the carve region.

Figure 5.10: Adding (right cursor) and revoking (left cursor) a user from a carve region (from Izadi et al., 2003)

5.5 Discussion This chapter has presented the design process carried out for Dynamo, a Community Display for on-going usage settings. Evaluation of Dynamo V1

members to become concerned about ownership. Indeed, such lack of  concern is consistent with the design goals aimed for with Community Displays for one-shot settings. However, in on-going usage settings, where owned, non-trivial content may be used (as observed in the field evaluation), and community members may invest more time and effort in usage of the display (as observed in the laboratory study), issues of  managing sharing and ownership come to the forefront of the users’ concerns. Management of sharing and ownership aside, the evaluation studies carried out suggest that the user experience principles put forward at the beginning of this chapter were generally effective in informing the design of Dynamo. However, the main evaluation is reported in the next chapters. In Chapter 6, a preliminary study of an authentic on-going setting is reported, to provide a point of comparison for the effect of Dynamo once deployed. In Chapter 7, the main study is reported, in which Dynamo was deployed in that setting

Chapter 6 Preliminary Observational study of an on-going setting

6.1 Introduction _________________________________________ 133

6.1 Introduction This chapter describes a one-week long preliminary observational study of  an on-going usage setting – the common room of a 6 th form college. The aim of this study was to investigate its suitability as a potential deployment site, and provide a grounding description of the community’s existing activities, practices and flow, to offer a point of comparison with the effects of Dynamo after it is deployed.

6.2 Preliminary observational study 6.2.1 The Deployment Site and User Community The site selected was the common room of Blatchington Mill 6 th form college, used used by a student student community. An initial visit suggested suggested this site

hour and a half, to three hours in total a day. The majority used it for less than an hour a day, to access resources such as the tea bar, their lockers, or to hang out while eating meals or having coffee with friends.

6.2.2 Rhythm and flow in the common room All students shared the same general timetable structure. Specifically, this meant that they shared a twenty minute morning break at 10:50 am, and an hour long lunch break at 1:10pm, during which time a tea bar in the common room was open, and students could buy hot food and drinks, which drew a flow of students into the room – at these times, the room was at its fullest. Also, lesson change-overs occurred every hour, at which time many students would return to the common room to use their lockers and have passing conversations with their friends. During these change-overs, the room would fill and empty rapidly – within a period of 5-10 minutes. Different students had different timetables, owing to the fact that they were

Figure 6.1: Floorplan of the common room

A honey-pot effect was also observed to regularly occur in the common room, similar to those described in the previous two case studies, except here without a large display involved. People would often check the

literature quietly for their coursework, while on the other side of the table, another student has left their folder and pencil case at the table, in the midst of working on an essay. Figure 6.2b depicts a gathering around a table, where one reads, two eat their lunch and another has their work on the table. In the background someone is putting on a CD, as shown close up in Figure 6.2c. Mixed in with these different activities is typically number of  simultaneous threads of informal conversation. These threads would move and interweave as people joined in and left, reflecting a continual undercurrent of socializing and mingling activities. Figure 6.2d shows a student giving a musical performance on their guitar. Other similar performances involved students telling stories and jokes, and playing music on the stereo, such as newly released albums. The common room would also be used as a convenient location for group work, for example, students working on group projects or proof-reading each others’ essays.

that they had received or were sending; and the act of entering would often be carried out with a flourish, a loud “hello” and handshakes or hugs. This resonates with Goffman’s (1969) sociological analysis of social life being a “theatrical performance” involving performer and audience.

stating that fancy dress was optional and everyone was invited. On the left hand side, the pin board is predominantly used by the staff to display “official” notices about lesson cancellations and room changes, among other things. Figure 6.3b also shows the use of the walls as a surface for displaying notices (on the left is a request to keep the room tidy, on the right an advertisement for another evening social event). Figure 6.3c shows a makeshift cardboard noticeboard constructed by the student committee (a group of students involved in organizing events and representing the community in staff meetings). This makeshift noticeboard was evidently constructed for lack of available existing display surfaces, and was used to display a list of people who had not paid for an upcoming theatre trip. Once paid, their names were crossed off, providing a public record. In addition to the pinning up of notices, flyers were often distributed around the room by students advertising upcoming events such as jumble sales (see

following vignette is an example of this practice – specifically, it involves a group of students passing around a digital camera and chatting about the photos. Figure 6.5, overleaf, shows a series of video stills from the event, with corresponding descriptive text. To give a background for this vignette, it occurred in morning break  (11.30am) on a Tuesday (day 2 of the study). Frame 1 depicts 4 girls (names anonymised) – Mary standing on the left, next to Cathy, holding her digital camera, followed by Penny on her right, and on the far right of the photo is Becca, who is busy writing. The four girls sit at a table, with their coursework and writing materials out. Cathy has just taken out her digital camera, and has begun to browse photos with Penny, looking over her shoulder. As the text in the figure describes, they browse the photos photos as a group, either passing the camera round, holding it out for everyone to see, or leaning in close. As the group looks through the photos, this furnishes them with material to talk about, and provides a memory function for them to

(1) Cathy & Penny (middle) talk about

and laugh at the photos on the camera, while Becca (right) studies. Mary (left) notices their gathering and approaches… (2) Mary leans in to see the photos, and

chats to Cathy and Penny.

(3) Cathy puffs her cheeks out doing an

impression of herself in one of the photos, the group laughs loudly. After a few minutes, Mary says bye and moves off, ending up socializing with another group. (4) Becca, asks for the camera to see the

photo they are currently looking at.

The small screen of the digital camera poses some limitations to their group viewing activity – which they remedy with the “work around” of passing the camera around (e.g. frame 3), leaning in (e.g. frame 2), and holding the camera out (e.g. frame 5). During the 4 minutes and 22 seconds of the vignette clip, the camera was moved and the people re-arrange themselves 22 times- an average of approximately once every twelve seconds, which may be an unnecessary amount of ‘re-arranging’ work if instead a Community Display like Dynamo was used. However, there may be other benefits to using the camera, such as privacy of visibility within the group. Frame 7 shows how the sharing of the digital photos had to be deferred for two days, since the camera alone did not provide this function, and the owner did not know how to carry out the CD-recording procedure without help. This also suggests that Dynamo may be suitable in this setting, since it allows sharing and exchange to be easy and spontaneous. spontaneous. This discussion of technology usage leads onto a survey carried out on the

Figure 6.5: Personal devices regularly used at college, as indicated by survey respondents.

In rank order, the most popular to least popular devices were: non-mms mobile phones (60%), followed by mms (photo-capable) mobile phones

Figure 6.6: Digital information sharing activities regularly undertaken, as indicated by survey respondents.

In summary, the most dominant practice was mobile phone voice calls, at 95%, followed by textual emails (91%), SMS (91%), emails with

contributing to its centrality and offering opportunities for serendipitous interaction. In general, the common common room was observed to be a comfortable place in which people passed time and interacted with others (Oldenburg, 1989) for the purpose of enjoyment. Responses to the survey showed that the sample of community members were of average level computer expertise, carried an assortment of personal devices, and engaged in a range of information sharing practices. Noticeboards and flyers were also widely used for asynchronous information dissemination. Together with the vignette example of social digital camera usage, this suggests a great potential for Dynamo to be employed in this setting to support their existing practices.

Chapter 7 The adoption of Dynamo in an ongoing setting

7.1 Introduction _________________________________________ 146 7.2 Study Details ________________________________________ 149 7.2.1 Duration _____________________ _____________________________________________ __________________________ __ 149 7.2.2 Study set up _________________________ ___________________________________________ __________________ 149 7.2.2 Participant briefing and instructional materials _________________ 151 7.2.4 Participant consent ______________________________________ 152 7.2.5 Observation and a nd data capture ______________________________ 152

7.3 Study Findings ___________________ ____________________________ __________________ __________ _ 154 7.3.1 Overview of findings _______________________ _____________________________________ ______________ 154 7.3.2 Analysis of log data _____________________________ 157

7.1 Introduction

developed included using Dynamo as a prop to entice social interaction with peers; using it as a stage to give entertaining performances to large groups during breaks; using it as resource to support socializing and mingling in “multifocused gatherings” (Goffman, 1963); and engaging in policing and tidying activities to maintain it as a communal resource that benefited the majority. Vignettes describing these practices are analyzed in detail. The vignettes reveal many parallels with their prior practices. For example, prior to Dynamo, they would give performances, e.g. playing guitars or telling jokes; they would socialize using magazines and digital cameras as props; and they would maintain the room’s communal resources (e.g. tables, chairs and the stereo) through policing and tidying carried out by particular community members. This emphasizes how they appropriated Dynamo to meet the needs of their own community setting, i.e. to do familiar things in new ways, and this shows the importance of providing flexible and openended functionality to enable them to do this.

conversational role, to gradually using interaction points and devices more and more often. Furthermore, they would often get support and help from their friends, in the form of “over the shoulder” learning, side-by-side tutoring and “back seat” tutoring, which was facilitated by Dynamo’s multiuser functionality. Social interaction involving Dynamo but not involving direct interaction with it was also regularly observed, for example in presenter-audience type activities. This was found to be a legitimate form of participation which enabled the wider community to benefit from learning about the displayed information (e.g. awareness of their peers’ interests and activities outside of  college), and more generally, to benefit from the enjoyment of the social interaction itself. A number of different factors were observed to vary in usage situations. For example, the spontaneity or planned-ness of the interaction, the type of  personal device used (if any), individual or group arrangement, and the type

7.2 Study Details 7.2.1 Duration Dynamo was deployed in the Blatchington 6 Common Room for a total of  10 days in December 2003. The room was available to students on weekdays from 8.30-5.30.

7.2.2 Study set up The deployment setting was described in detail in Chapter 6, and is not repeated in this section. Figure 7.2, overleaf, shows a floor plan of the room in use, with Dynamo fully deployed. The Dynamo Displays (two 52” plasma screens) were deployed against a free wall, and the Dynamo hardware was housed in a security cupboard adjacent to this. Two digital cameras and a number of pen drives were provided on a free loan basis. Students could simply sign out items and borrow them as they

7.2.2 Participant briefing and instructional materials Prior to the preliminary study, a number of students had been told informally about Dynamo by the researchers and by the staff at the school. They were made aware that two large plasma screens connected to a computer were going to be installed in the common room, allowing them to display and share documents and multimedia. On the first day of the study when Dynamo was installed, a briefing session lasting 30 minutes was carried out with 18 students. This involved a demonstration of the system’s features. As well as the students, the teaching staff were introduced to Dynamo, and were informed of the possibilities of using Dynamo for student learning and group activities. Three teachers designed activities involving Dynamo and advocated them to their students as voluntary activities for their spare time. The photography teacher asked students to scan their portfolios and put them on Dynamo to get critical feedback. She also created a public parcel

7.2.4 Participant consent Permission was gained from the college allowing us to observe and record the students’ use of Dynamo. This blanket agreement was possible since the college held the legal position of “in loco parentis”, i.e. acting as the students’ parents while they were at the college. As a further courtesy to the students, they were also given participation consent forms (see appendix 2 for more details). Only 2 students expressly did not wish to participate in the study at all. A further 5 students agreed to participate but requested that any video and photos of themselves remain confidential and unpublished. At the same time as the consent forms were distributed, a disclaimer form was also distributed, which students had to sign in agreement in order to participate. This stated that they agreed not to use Dynamo in an anti-social or illegal manner, and that if they did, they took full personal responsibility for their actions. Copies of these documents are available in appendix 2.

the users’ behaviours in the immediate vicinity. The “behaviour camera” was pointed from the side of the plasma screens outwards towards the users and the room behind. Finally, the mobile camera was hand-held and was moved or zoomed around the room in order to record the detail of any ongoing user interactions. Each day, 9 hours of video was captured from three simultaneous angles, producing a total of 270 hours of video. This video was captured digitally, and the different camera angles were synchronized using Final Cut Pro™. Three months were spent transcribing the video footage into a written r eport for each day of the study. Using Jordan and Henderson’s (1995) Interaction Analysis approach, these reports were analyzed according to a set of defined foci. These included chunking the reports into events, locating the beginnings, endings, and segmentation within these events, the rhythm and periodicy of daily activities, spatial organization of interaction, and trouble and repair in these interactions (Jordan and Henderson, 1995). In addition to

7.3 Study Findings The findings are reported in the following manner. First, an overview is provided, to give a feel for the findings as a whole. Then, the log data is analyzed, giving an understanding of the progression of feature usage over the duration of the study. Some aspects of the post hoc survey are also reported here to show the uptake of Dynamo and the progress of registration over time. Then, a series of five illustrated vignettes will be detailed. Finally, the findings are condensed into a set of key principles.

7.3.1 Overview of findings In all, the Dynamo deployment can be regarded as a success. The system was used throughout the study by a range of different community members and for a number of different kinds of activities. Post hoc feedback on the system was overwhelmingly positive from the users (78% of survey

analysis about the important role of “low engagement” and peripheral interaction with Dynamo is carried out in Section 7.4.1. It was noted that that the common room became progressively busier through the study. Feedback from the post hoc survey tallies with this observation. In response to a question asking about Dynamo’s effect on life in the common room, selected participants responded: responded: “More people stayed in the common room.” “A lot more people spent time in common room.” “Dynamo made people socialise more in the common room and was fun to use.” “It made the common room more interesting and a lot more crowded”

Respondents also commented on the positive effects Dynamo had on socializing and community interaction, as shown below. Although these quotes do not provide conclusive evidence, they provide a general feel for

continued to try Dynamo for the first time from day 1 right up until day 9 of  the study. In total, 21 students registered with Dynamo, of which 16 responded to the post hoc survey.

7.3.2 Analysis of log data The log data collected by Dynamo comprised a time-stamped report of  certain types of user interactions. These included plugging a personal device in or out of the Dynamo hub; dragging media onto or off the surface via palettes; creating, moving or resizing windows for media, parcels, notes and carves; and interacting with windows using toolbars and scrollbars. These interactions were totaled up for each period of each day, to show the overall rhythm and density of interaction over the study as a whole. This is shown in Figure 7.5 overleaf.

(Legend: White=0, light grey = 1-200, medium grey = 201-400, dark grey= grey= 401-600, Black= 601+)

Figure 7.5: Aggregate usage through the study (Brignull et al., 2004).

158

The patterns shown in Figure 7.5 indicate a rhythm of usage that followed the overall daily timetable, with usage peaking around morning break and lunch break. The log data also captured the occurrence of usage of different media types over the course of the study. Figure 7.6, below, shows a bar graph depicting the amount of media displayed on the Dynamo surface. The most popular media types throughout were images (shown in turquoise) followed by video (shown in maroon), reflecting the popularity of activities relating to use of digital cameras (both those provided and the students’ own). Internet connectivity was not available in the first week due to college network issues, but in the second week it was fixed, which explains the sudden upsurge in HTML content in the second week (shown in yellow). It is interesting to consider the popularity of community generated media (photos and video from cameras), in comparison to other kinds of media, including web-sites in the second week.

keeping, and which were blurred or poorly framed. This accounts for the large amount of images and videos displayed on the surface, but not downloaded to personal devices.

Figure 7.7: Occurrence of Media downloaded onto personal devices from the Dynamo Surface (Brignull et al., 2004)

Figure 7.8: Adoption of the “parcel” and “carve” system features (Brignull et al., 2004).

As the graph in Figure 7.8 shows, carving (in blue), was used more frequently in the first week than in the second, where it dropped to a consistent low. Together with the observations of user behaviour, this can

Figure 7.9: bar graph showing the increasing use of parcels to display images (Brignull et al., 2004). 2004).

The bar graph in Figure 7.9 shows that in the first couple of days, images were displayed on the surface in a fairly ephemeral manner. The duration of  image displays on the surface steadily increases in the first week. This is

parcels was often photographs of students out of college on their breaks, or their activities from the previous evening or weekend, and thus this “catch up” activity provided an awareness function.

7.3.4 Overview of vignettes The video data and observational notes from the study were analyzed using Jordan and Henderson’s (1995) Interaction Analysis approach, (see Section 7.2.5) to create an index of notable events and social behaviours that took  place each day of the study. From this index, a selection of five vignettes were taken (shown in Figure 7.10), chosen on the basis that each provided a rich and insightful description of the different kinds of practices engaged in with Dynamo.

while the majority of people go about other activities such as studying or talking between themselves, only being involved with Dynamo through low-engagement interactions such as peripheral observation and shouting comments. Vignette (d) (Figure 7.10d) shows an example of opportunistic use during a lesson change-over. The interaction begins with the intention of rapidly showing an image from one person to another, and quickly changes into a large group conversation about the displayed media. Vignette (e) (Figure 7.10e) shows an example of the “individual-to-group” performances that were occasionally seen. Here one user gave an entertaining performance displaying photos, videos and music to an audience which quickly swelled owing to a honey-pot effect. In summary, this overview of vignettes shows a diversity in the ways Dynamo was appropriated by the community, ranging from prepared to ad hoc use, from individual to group use, and from low engagement to high

7.3.5 Vignette (a) enticing social interaction Vignette (a) took place on day 8 of the study (10.30am), and is detailed in Figure 7.11, overleaf. This vignette illustrates the use of Dynamo as an audio-visual conversational prop in enticing socializing, i.e. using it to tempt people into a conversation, to furnish content and provide common ground. It is also an example of a planful use of Dynamo - Alan (the individual) collected a selection of media from his home computer in advance to show his acquaintances at college. Having some spare time, and seeing some familiar faces at the back of the room, Alan prepares some media on the Dynamo screen, and then initiates a conversation with them about it. His choice of media is also of interest – he plays the group a series of tracks of electronic music he composed himself at home. He gets positive feedback and, as a result of then putting his tracks in a public parcel, the tracks are re-played repeatedly over the following few days, are talked about by various people, and are downloaded 5 times. As well as disseminating

(1) Alan arrives alone and sits at the front table (left). He plugs in his pen drive, and browses some of his media, opening it on the screen. He then glances to the group behind him (right). (2). He turns to the group at the back and calls over: “Hey, Donny, my home-made music”. He starts an MP3 playing. Anna comments: “wow! It’s amazing! ”, and Don says “You made that?” – Alan replies “On  fruity loops… and cubase.” Don goes over and stands next to him, appreciatively miming a drumming action with the pen in his hand. (3) Alan opens another tune “This one is the newest  one of mine”. Anna comments “I love it!”. She goes over to stand next to Alan and Don, and appreciatively claps along with the music.

(3) When the music stops, Alan creates a parcel and fills it with his MP3s, labeling it “Adam’s Beats’. During this quiet period, Anna asks Don to buy her some food. They head to the tea bar at the back of the

7.3.6 Vignette (b) concurrent group use for socializing Vignette (b) occurred on day 5 of the study (1.30pm) and is detailed in Figure 7.12, overleaf. overleaf. It is an example of concurrent concurrent group use of Dynamo Dynamo for socializing. At the front of the room, six people sit in a row facing Dynamo. As depicted in frame 1, two on the right share an interaction point, the second from the left has his own interaction point, and the person on the far left, and two others (out of frame) share an interaction point between the three of them. Dynamo’s functionality, allowing multiple media windows to be displayed concurrently, and allowing different users to dip into each others’ windows, windows, is used here for socializing. socializing. The group chat amongst amongst themselves, using the displayed media like a buffet of conversational topics. The conversations held are relaxed and lightweight, without any clear goal apart from enjoyment of the interaction. Also of note in this vignette is the distribution of expertise. The two most

(1) Seated left to right: Joe, Rich, Mike, and Bob (also Colin and Charlotte, out of frame on the left). Colin, Rich and Bob have interaction points, which they share with the people sitting next to them. Two simultaneous conversations occur: Mike and Bob talk about iPods, while Colin, Joe and Rich talk about mountain-biking, and look  at Rich’s own website detailing his mountain-biking hobby. (2) [Mike] “What else shall we look at?” [Bob] “Oh I  know!”- Mike and Bob move on to looking at a site about a cartoon from their youth (the web browser window pictured left)..

(3) This inspires Colin to go to a site about another cartoon. The two conversations converge into one as the whole group talks together, and then splits into two again. This happens repeatedly. During the chat, Rich quietly takes a copy of the website URL onto his pen-drive.

7.3.7 Vignette (c) low engagement group interaction Vignette (c) occurred on Day 3 of the user study, in the morning (9.45am), as detailed in figure 7.13, overleaf. In this vignette, usage of Dynamo was in the background while most people studied or sat in clusters around tables talking quietly, and only becoming involved in Dynamo interactions in passing from time to time. It is the nature of this low engagement, background participation that is of particular interest in this vignette. Around the room, people sit in circles around tables, either working or chatting. They are generally oriented away from Dynamo, preoccupied with what they are doing. Nina decides to put on some music from her walkman (frame 1), and she goes over. She asks a question loudly and Anna, who was quietly working in the background overhears and shouts “yep!” in reply. This helpful involvement required minimal effort or disruption to Anna, enabled by her peripheral awareness of the environment.

(1) Nina decides to put on a song from her personal MP3 player. She has never connected her MP3 player before. She asks if she is plugging it into the right place, and someone shouts “yep” from the background.

(2) She plugs in and her personal disk icon appears. Meanwhile Crispin plays a video of Peter. Nina watches but there is relatively little attention from the room as a whole, people are predominantly involved in their own conversations or work.

(3) Amy moves to sit down. Note the lack of attention of others to her or the screen.

(3) Nina interrupts Peter’s conversation (pictured rear left) and asks him to help her play her music on Dynamo. He replies that he doesn’t know how, but

7.3.8 Vignette (d) opportunistic use in a transition Vignette (d) took place on day 6 of the study (12.10pm), during a changeover between lessons. As depicted in Figure 7.14a, it shows how Dynamo was sometimes used for rapid interactions during brief windows of  opportunity, such as the five minutes between lessons or before the bus arrives. It also shows how Dynamo was given the role of an open forum in which public involvement was expected and welcomed. As depicted in Figure 7.14b, the vignette begins as Peter notices Charlotte passing through the room on the way to her lesson, and he asks to show her a photo he had previously been talking to her about. He has very little time to do so, because she is already late for her lesson. However, he rapidly logs in, finds, opens and up-sizes the picture to a very large size. Charlotte’s friends gather in a honey-pot effect, and chat about the displayed media before leaving, demonstrating Dynamo’s role as an open forum for public

Figure 7.14a: panoramic view of vignette

(1) Peter notices Charlotte passing through through in a lesson lesson change over, and calls over: “Charlotte, I’ve got that song, I was playing it… I’ve also.. got a really big picture of Justin, on stage, in the middle, sittin’ down” [Sally interrupts] “with a hood up!’ [Peter continues] “I’ll show you… Do you have a lesson?’ …

(2) Charlotte (pictured standing) and the other girls (out of shot) wait in the area by the door, in view of Dynamo from a wide angle. [Peter] “Wait! I’ll show you! Wait stay there and I’ll show  you… Are you ready?”

7.3.9 Vignette (e) individual performing to a large group Vignette (e) took place on day 7, at the beginning of the lunch break  (1.10pm). As depicted in Figure 7.15a, this vignette emphasizes how the community as a whole benefit from the system without them all needing to be active Dynamo users. As shown in Figure 7.15b, the room is busy since it is a cold day. Leo arrives in the room with some friends fri ends and word goes round that Leo is going to show some videos on Dynamo. After Leo starts his interaction, no-one else touches an interaction point, and it becomes a clear “presenteraudience” style of interaction. He selects media that is entertaining to the audience and provides awareness about community members, particularly information that is normally hidden, e.g. people’s activities in the holidays and on weekends, and in one case, photos of a community member who had not been seen in college for months. The audience talk between themselves

Figure 7.15a: panoramic photo of vignette (1) At the beginning of the lunch break, people arrive to buy food, eat and hang out. It is a cold day so the crowd is larger than usual. Leo arrives and heads to the laptop at the back of  the room to prepare the content on his pen-drive for the show he is about to give. He sorts his media into folders, putting the media for the show in the root directory, and all his other files into a directory called “stuff”. (2) When ready, Leo goes to sit at the front of the room by an interaction point. He clears some space on the Dynamo surface, and is assisted by a friend on another interaction point. Thereafter nobody interacts with Dynamo apart from Leo during his show. The audience grows as more people arrive in the room. (3) Leo plays a series of home videos showing him and other community members “hanging out” on holiday (which he

7.4 Analysis of findings 7.4.1 Appropriation: the emergence of practices over time As the study progressed, there was increasing evidence of appropriation – the community came to understand Dynamo as relevant to their own needs, and developed practices that reflected this. For example, they came to conceptualize Dynamo as a tool for socializing and fun interaction, rather than a tool for work. They developed practices of initiating conversations, group social interaction and the giving of performances through Dynamo. Also, they learned about Dynamo’s facilities for storing and displaying media persistently, and developed practices for managing the emergent clutter and sharing the use of the display estate. This section will detail each of these appropriations, and show how many of these have marked parallels with the social practices engaged in prior to the arrival of Dynamo.

similar to the way people use normal desktop PCs when they log in and log out. However, as time progressed, they began to realize the potential of  persistence in leaving up media, notes and parcels as a means for showing and sharing with the wider community. This was most prevalent in the form of leaving public parcels and public, open windows on the surface, as shown in the log analysis detailed in Section 7.3.2. Initially, people would leave items in the center of the display, but as time went on, they tended to become more considerate, and would leave persistent items sized down to a compact size at the far left and right edges of the displays, leaving ample open space for public usage and avoiding occlusion of the palettes. Interestingly, other users learned not to close these items down, by judging whether they looked like they had been intentionally left up for public consumption. In doing this, they would also often close down media that looked like a “waste of space” (such as extraneous file browser windows) or that had been on display a long while. This provided a mechanism for

sometimes putting newer or personally favoured items first, and older items last. Again, one particular user (called Crispin [name anonymised]) took on this role, as shown in Figure 7.16, below.

Figure 7.16 Crispin tidying parcels on days 5 (left) and 9 (middle), and a paper notice (right)

Both the users who took on maintenance roles with Dynamo were also members of the student union: a small group of students who had a position of responsibility and were partially in charge of managing the upkeep of the common room. For example, Crispin not only took responsibility for parcel tidying, but also was responsible for putting up the posters for keeping the room itself tidy. Therefore there was a strong parallel between the practices

stage for their performances, which they gave using digital media where previously they used traditional delivery methods.

- Concurrent multi-use for socializing As stated earlier, the initial reaction towards Dynamo was to use it in a manner similar to using a desktop PC. As well as clearing the screen before and after use, they also began by taking in turns in using it, even though it supported multiple simultaneous users. They quickly realized they could use it concurrently, and, as time went on, they started to engage in multi-user activities. The activity of enticing a socializing conversation and group interaction with Dynamo became a common practice. This is demonstrated in vignette (a) (Section 7.3.5), where Alan invites some friends to come over and talk to him, using Dynamo as an audio-visual prop to provide an enticing stimulus

web together, as detailed in vignette (b) (Section 7.3.6), using it as a resource to spontaneously find and display media to socialize about. These progressed from being occasional activities to familiar practices which people engaged in, becoming part of the community’s “vocabulary” of  things to do with Dynamo.

7.4.2 Levels of engagement and gradual buy-in People in the vicinity of Dynamo were able to “oversee” (Heath and Luff, 1992) interactions while going about other things, i.e. without needing to give it their full and undivided attention. As detailed in Chapter 2 (Section 2.3), O’Neil et al. (2004) refer to this property of visibility in the surrounding area as a “public interaction space”. This property also supported a model of “informal performer and audience” where the performer or performers can be keen Dynamo users, putting effort and time into the interaction, while the informal audience of people in the room can

for a particular interaction, or, as Goffman puts it, the “various grades of onlookers” (p.18).

Figure 7.17: levels of engagement

Beginning at very low engagement, the scale begins with “being present”. Although this in itself is not explicit interaction, it alters the ecology of the room and provides the opportunities for further interaction. Next on the scale is “bodily reaction”. This includes re-orientation towards the screens (e.g. craning neck or turning chair to watch), and “bobbing” or dancing in time with music. Next on the scale is “chirping”. This term was coined during analysis to describe brief, low effort and low commitment

The significance of these levels of engagement was that it enabled “gradual buy-in” in that over the course of the study, a number of users tended to move from typically low engagement or occasional use of Dynamo, to progressively higher levels, and in doing so, their expertise of Dynamo increased. In other words, people learned about the system piecemeal and while going about their normal daily activities in the t he common room, without them necessarily intending to do so. Although two community members were highly motivated, and became dedicated users of Dynamo from the first day onwards, the post hoc survey data shows that the majority of  community members took their time. As previously discussed in Section 7.3.1, there was a wide spread in the respondents’ day of initial use, and for those who registered, there was a wide spread in the length of time between initial use and registration. The following interview quote (from an interview with Charlotte after the study) illustrates the nature of the gradual buy-in that many community members engaged in:

Another example can be given with a short description of Heather’s progress of buy-in to Dynamo. The point of note here is that nowhere along the line did Heather explicitly set out to learn about Dynamo, her expertise effectively “crept up on her”: 1. Days 1 & 2: Heather was rather uninterested in Dynamo, and tended to only watch videos when they were played by other users (very low engagement). 2. Days 3-4: She started to use it occasionally with her friends to pass time between lessons (occasional episodes of high engagement). 3. Day 5: In an interaction with a registered friend on Dynamo, she learned about the benefits of registration, in particular, the use of  carving for access control and posting items permanently on the surface. This spontaneously motivated her to register with the system

interaction to fit into this window. In this sense, the entry point was “open” and enabled this interaction. Had lengthier interaction been required by the system, or had they needed to queue to use it rather than being able to just grab a free interaction point, this would have prevented their interaction, i.e. the entry point would have been “closed”. Other factors these entry points varied upon included: •

Spontaneous or planned interaction

•

Type of personal device used, if any

•

Registered or unregistered interaction

•

Individual or group interaction

•

Type of co-operative support received, if any

These factors combined into a wide array of contingencies. For example, one contingency might be a spontaneous interaction using a digital camera,

Tuesday of the second week, a novice user was observed entering the room alone during a quiet period in the afternoon, and, upon seeing a familiar Google search page that happened to be open on the surface, sat down and started browsing the web. Shortly afterwards a friend entered the room, also a Dynamo novice, and they started co-browsing together and learning more about Dynamo. One of the most frequently observed closed entry points was that registration with the system required the user to have a personal device (owing to the way the system was implemented). This meant that if a user did not own one, or happened not to have one with them at that point in time, they could not register. In the following quote, Martha sees Daniel making carve regions, (a facility only available to registered users), and learns about their access control function from playing with him: Martha: "How do I make those coloured boxes?" [referring to carve regions]

them to the system and showing them activities it could be used for. It is interesting to consider this against the fact that out of the 100 instructional leaflets that were provided provided adjacent to the Community Community Display, only seven seven were taken. This shows that the mechanism of informal learning and support from community advocates was more prominent than the use of formal instructional materials. Agostini et al. (2000) make a similar observation in field studies of the Campiello Community Display system: “[…] the community came up with its own system-oriented practices for fostering the peripheral participation of new users until able to acquire the knowledge necessary for acting alone and maybe becoming ‘trainers’ themselves. For instance, at the Campiello stands we often saw that after having registered and grasped the basics of Campiello, kids kept coming back with friends or relatives, proudly helping them to do the things they had just learned. Therefore […] the places where the system is made accessible should allow and possibly stimulate the creation of these practices.” (p. 719)

point with a more experienced user, as was the case for the pairs in vignette (b) (Section 7.3.6).

The various possibilities of supported supported interaction

through the multi-user Dynamo interface can be conceptualized as a set of  open entry points, since they provide a number of paths by which a person can enter into an interaction with Dynamo. However, upon closer inspection of the observations, the multi-user interface was found to also present some closed entry points. For example, when unregistered users tried to use Dynamo cooperatively with a logged-in user (only registered users could log-in), they were typically prevented from doing so because of the way the access-control model was implemented. Specifically, windows opened by logged-in users could not be manipulated by anyone but the owner, unless the owner used carve regions to provide access to others. However, the carve region interaction model required the user to drop the key icon on the personal palette of a logged-in user. Since un-logged-in users did not have a personal

prevented him from achieving the tutored interaction. Later in the study, some registered users discovered that they could put items in a public parcel to give access to unregistered users, or log out to interact freely with unregistered users. However, these work-arounds were not always always clear, and users either gave up on such interactions or interacted independently of  each other, unable to take advantage of the possibility of tutoring by means of simultaneous interaction.

7.5 Discussion The bulk of the discussion of the findings will be reported in depth in Chapter 8. As such, this section provides an overview of the findings and a discussion summary. As suggested in the findings of the preliminary study reported in the previous chapter, this study has confirmed that Dynamo was well suited to

While the phenomena of “overseeing”, “vicarious learning” and the “honeypot effect” were evident here, they manifested themselves differently to that observed in the one-shot setting studies. These differences can be summarized in the following three concepts, as put forward in Section 7.4. “Levels of engagement” describes how people were able to be involved with interactions relating to the Community Display without having to be completely immersed in the interaction. This meant that they could be involved in interactions while going about their normal daily activities in the space – e.g. hanging out, talking to friends, drinking coffee, studying, and so forth. This enabled incidental and vicarious learning, which was the most important way in which community members became users. The second key concept put forward was “ gradual buy-in”. This describes how most community members tended to decide not to become fully-fledged users on the spot, but adopted the system in a piecemeal fashion, in a gradual manner that suited them. The third key concept put forward was

Chapter 8 Discussion

8.1 Introduction _________________________________________ 191 8.2 Understanding the Phenomena of Situated Social Behaviour around Community Displays ______________________________ 192 8.3 Understanding Adoption Adoption in one-shot settings ____________ ____________ 200 8.3 Understanding Adoption Adoption in on-going settings ____________ ____________ 208

8.1 Introduction This chapter will address the research questions posed for this thesis in Chapter 2. It will do this by reviewing and consolidating the findings of the user studies, and will draw out design suggestions, which will be shown as grey highlighted boxes throughout the body of the chapter. These design suggestions are clarifications and improvements on the suggestions and user experience principles put forward earlier in the thesis. They are intended to enable Community Display system designers to browse through this t his chapter and quickly locate the parts most relevant to them. The research questions are repeated below. 1. Understanding the phenomena of situated social behaviour around Community Displays a. What common phenomena of situated behaviour are observed across all the case studies? b. How are the social properties of the Community Display involved in these phenomena?

8.2 Understanding the Phenomena of Situated Social Behaviour around Community Displays This section will address research questions 1a, 1b and 1c by discussing them generally: 1a. What common phenomena of situated behaviour are observed across all the case studies? 1b. How are the social properties of the Community Community Display involved in these phenomena? 1c. How does this relate to the process of community adoption?

Common to all three of the case studies were phenomena relating to the   public availability of usage of the display and people in the vicinity overseeing these activities, which resulted in mechanisms that supported

usage and adoption. This section will detail these phenomena in each case study. In the first case study, a team of audio-visual technicians used a large

spontaneous gatherings of three or four people who would stand together and work on the large display, discussing it, gesturing and annotating on it. What was particularly beneficial about this mechanism was that it enabled co-operative group work to occur, without requiring any effortful coordination or articulation work (cf . Schmidt and Simone, 1996, on articulation work). For example, the person in need of help did not need to radio out a message to the team requesting it and negotiating a time to meet in front of the display. The quote below from Jordan and Henderson (1995) postulates that a similar mechanism may occur with large displays used in industrial process control rooms. “In industrial process control rooms, large public information displays often not only disseminate information but also provide the resources for making that information available for discussion. […] anomalies that become visible on large public displays tend to generate conversations and thereby draw multiple expertise into the process of explanation and resolution.” (p. 41)

this self sustained as people seemed to be stimulated to find out more about what the crowd was involved in and to join in the social activities. This resonates with Whyte’s (1980, 1988) analysis of urban parks and plazas in the USA, in which he states that above and beyond the features of the space itself, what attracts people most is other people. A further and more detailed analysis of the facilitators of interaction this setting is carried out in the following section.

G2: General Design Suggestion Consider positioning and flow to facilitate the honey-pot effect The spatial positioning of the Community Display in the target setting and the flow of people around it should be a primary consideration, since it plays a very important role in the key mechanisms of the honey-pot effect and vicarious learning. For example, the AV team studied in Chapter 3 positioned their large display in a manner so that there was a clear line of sight from all the doorways in the room (the key points of flow), and so that there was enough space for three people to cluster closely around it. Also, the Wall-loader prototype was found to be unsuitable for their needs because it was physically too bulky for their space, and interfered with the normal flow of people through the space.

between them. In reflection, one of the benefits here was that it allowed people to engage with the Community Display and with each other at their own discretion: it was up to them who they wished to freely associate and mingle with. Thus the Community Display helped the community engage in group interactions without requiring any formality or pre-arrangement. This is particularly relevant in this kind of one-shot setting, where there is a strong emphasis on recreation and enjoyment in interaction with other people (cf. Goffman, 1963) - an experience which is highly subjective. In the on-going setting studied, the activities engaged in and the topics of  discussion were very ad hoc. For example, in vignette (b) reported in Chapter 7 (Section 7.6.3), the conversation held by the group was “meandering” and much of the interaction was spent looking for an enjoyable activity or topic of conversation. As such, it would not make sense to try to planfully coordinate this sort of open-ended interaction. Instead, on-lookers and passers-by judged for themselves at any particular

any knowledge of its existence. To quote one interviewee “Nobody really knew what it was when they came in”. The members would progress in their

understanding of what the Community Display is by observing others using it. To quote another interviewee “… I did see people standing around it so I  stood beside and watched for a while” These observations allowed them to

learn about the system vicariously – allowing them to ascertain what the system did, how long it seemed to take, whether it looked easy or socially awkward, and so on. Based on these observations, they would evaluate whether or not to try out the Community Display themselves.

G3: General Design Suggestion Learnability should be easy, rapid and build upon the familiar In the AV team case study (Chapter 3), the team’s temporary members, were able to start using their large display system because it consisted of simple time-tables printed on paper, which were annotated with pen or sticky notes. This familiar medium enabled the temporary staff to learn how to use the system very rapidly. One way of achieving rapid learnability in the digital medium is to utilise familiar WIMP (Windows,

G4: General Design Suggestion (4) Use a visual interface to support vicarious learning If the interface is highly visual and displayed on the Community Display, an observer can learn the steps of interaction with the system by watching others using it. “Hidden” interactions like key combinations, gestures or interaction on an associated private display is hidden and will prevent this mechanism of learning. However, this observability has also been documented to cause evaluation apprehension in one shot settings which can deter usage. This is a trade-off that needs to be considered carefully (see Section 8.5.1)

Vicarious learning through public availability and overseeing is a very dominant mechanism in community adoption of Community Displays, primarily due to their large physical size. However, the following example shows that the mechanism of “vicarious learning through public availability and overseeing” is one that applies generally to any technology that is used in a communal space in a publicly available manner.

This strategy has a great deal in common with the design suggestions drawn from the findings of the case studies in this thesis (see the grey boxes on previous pages). By positioning by a lunch counter, Bell Co. are likely to have considered public availability of the telephone usage, the highly concentrated flow of people past the telephone as they queued to buy their food, and the stage-like “performance for an audience” nature of this spatial arrangement. Indeed, the choice of setting was a communal space in which people were on breaks from their work and likely to have the disposable time available to try out a new technology. It is interesting to consider how Bell Co leveraged situated voluntary adoption to facilitate marketplace adoption. Indeed, many modern marketing promotion techniques used in

encouraging marketplace adoption have similarities, for example, television advertising and product placement in films, in which interaction with a technology is depicted as a performance for potential users to observe and learn from (Kotler and Armstrong, 2004).

Having discussed the findings that relate to research questions 1a, b and c, the questions relating to the two different types of setting arise. However, before these are moved onto, another design suggestion first needs to be made. Referring back to Chapter 2, an analysis was carried out on of a number of published Community Display research studies which were aggregated on a set of dimensions. From this analysis, two marked clusters appeared: “one-shot” and “on-going” settings, which were defined on the dimensions of “permanence of communal space” and “community interconnectedness” (Section 2.5). The findings of the Opinionizer and Dynamo case studies provided further evidence of their existence and added detail to the understanding of their nature. Most importantly, the phenomena of situated behaviour and voluntary adoption were substantially different, requiring different design considerations for each setting. As such, this gives rise to an important question that Community Display designers must ask  themselves:

For example, the culture of the community and the practices normally carried out the space are also likely to have a big impact (cf. Orlikowski, 1992). Further limitations of the t he one-shot and on-going characterizations are discussed in detail in Section 9.2 of Chapter 9.

8.3 Understanding Adoption in one-shot settings Moving onto voluntary adoption in one-shot settings, this section will address the relevant research questions (2a, 2b and 2c) specified in Section 8.1. 2a.

2b. 2c.

How do people progress from complete naivety of a Community Display to participation in related social activities and direct interaction with it? How does usage spread through the community? What are the implications for design to improve adoption?

Community Display is likely to be limited, and may even be as short as a few minutes (as seen in the Opinionizer field studies, Chapter 4). Finally, when considering using the Community Display, they are likely to be apprehensive of being evaluated by on-lookers, and be concerned about the possibility of social awkwardness or embarrassment (cf. Section 4.6). The model of interaction put forward in the one-shot setting case study (Chapter 4) describes the steps a user takes in deciding to interact. This is summarized in Figure 8.1. The first step in this process is achievement of  initial visibility, i.e. the individual becoming aware of the Community Display’s existence. Therefore it is highly important that people in the communal space are likely to actually see it. A strategy to achieve this is to position the Community Display in a way that offers line of sight  to the main points of flow which community members pass through, e.g. the entrance to the space. Furthermore, if these are places where users spend time queuing (e.g. at a bar or food buffet), it is desirable that there is also

Following the achievement of initial visibility (the first decision point shown in Figure 8.1), the community member then needs to be stimulated to take a closer look and find out more about what the Community Display does. This decision point is defined as the “threshold to attention”, and is depicted in yellow in Figure 8.1 (a re-representation of the i nteraction model put forward in Chapter 4). Encouraging a community member to cross this threshold entails a number of design considerations, since the display must entice the user forward, as described in the following design suggestion:

OS3: Design Suggestion for one shot settings Use aesthetic wow factor to capture attention Studies of the Opinionizer system in Chapter 4 indicated that colourful, aesthetically pleasing graphic design seemed to be effective in getting users attention. However, there is clearly a balance here in that users should be made aware of a Community Display’s existence without posing an annoying visual distraction (e.g. the use of bright flashing lights or images).

costs, e.g. the time and the effort. The system designer needs to facilitate this decision-making process by communicating the key information about the system to the observer in a clear and concise manner, as detailed in the following design suggestion:

OS4: Design Suggestion for one shot settings Communicate nature and function clearly and concisely The designers need to communicate the general functionality and interaction style of the system to the user quickly and clearly, so they can acquire this information through low-engagement, low-investment glances at the system while going about other things. In the case of Opinionizer, the system provided one simple function – enabling users to write one sentence opinions on a topical theme displayed – a function that could be comprehended by briefly observing others using it.

The Opinionizer studies showed that a key factor on which a participant is likely to negatively evaluate a Community Display system and decide not to use it is the factor of “social awkwardness” (Brignull and Rogers, 2003), also known as “evaluation apprehension” (Nunamaker et al., 1991). This is

earlier, a major attractor of people is other people. Therefore design suggestions G1 to G4 are important here. Reflecting on this model of interaction, it is interesting to consider how useful it is as an analytical tool in interpreting other study findings and making suggestions for re-design. Two examples will be used here. Firstly, in Carter et al.’s (2002) study of their “Iconic” Community Display in a one shot setting, they found that voluntary adoption of the system was low and that people tended to ignore it. The thresholds put forward in the interaction model appear to offer much to improve their problem. Firstly, looking at the threshold to attention, the question arises, did the observers tend to even notice the Community Display? If not, this could account for the adoption problem, and the designers would have benefited from rethinking the installation, e.g. the screen size, its visibility from within the space, and the attractiveness of the displayed information. On the other hand, if people were tending to look at the system, but not

Community Display. McCarthy et al. took the step of making the community members aware of the existence of the system in advance, in an email sent out 4 days prior to the event, in which a link was provided to an explanatory web-site (McCarthy et al., 2004; McCarthy, Personal Communication March 9, 2005). This served to temporally extend the stages of interaction. Referring back to Figure 8.1, this served to enable users to pass through the thresholds of “attention” and “interaction”. A keen user therefore could decide to buy-in to the system having read about it, and the only remaining step would be for them to locate the displays in the venue. However, McCarthy does not report a great deal of success with this approach. In fact, he observed that people were most motivated to become users after having seen others using the system – the order which the interaction model (depicted in Figure 8.1) proposes. It seems that witnessing usage of the system first hand is a potent motivator to adoption. To quote

interaction model would concur, since this would entice more users to pass through the threshold to interaction. Furthermore, the interaction model also suggests that in evaluating whether or not to cross the threshold to interaction and use the system, people will weigh up the cost of the amount of time and effort required to interact, against the benefit of the interaction (e.g. social interaction, enjoyment or entertainment; cf. Chapter 4; Brignull & Rogers, 2003). Registration to use the Proactive Displays was a 3 step process, to quote McCarthy et al.: “First, an attendee needed to create a proactive display database profile. […] Second, at the conference, the attendee had to get an RFID tag and activate it […] at one of the two activation kiosks available on-site. Finally, an attendee needed to actually wear the activated RFID tag” (McCarthy et al., 2004; p. 42).

Had this process been streamlined, this 3 stage process could possibly have been made a single, brief step. For example, the web spider software could

8.3 Understanding Adoption in on-going settings This section will address research questions 3a, 3b, 3c and 3d: 3a. How does usage progress and adapt over time? 3b. How does adoption spread through the community? 3c. How does the community appropriate the Community Display Display and how does it become integrated into community life? 3d. What are the implications for design to improve adoption?

A key characteristic of on-going settings is that t hat they are established settings. People use them as part of their daily lives: they have activities they normally carry out, practices they normally engage in, and. accepted rules (“norms”) which they adhere to. A Community Display for an on-going setting should aim to either support these activities and practices or become integrated into new ones. In other words it should aim to become familiar and regularly used by community members. The name for this kind of 

freeform text entry, drawing, media display, arrangement, and sharing. Such functions can be exploited in a range of different activities, e.g. formal meetings, brainstorming activities, noticeboard display, socializing, and so forth. This leads into the following design suggestion:

OG1: Design Suggestion for on-going settings Design for appropriation Rather than designing with a single activity in mind (as would be appropriate for a one-shot setting), the Community Display needs to offer functions that offer flexibility, which the community may appropriate and use to develop practices that suit them. For example, in the AV team case study (Chapter 3), members appropriated the flexible function of spatial arrangement and sizing to communicate the urgency of items to each other. They did this by making urgent items larger and positioning them to the side of the main display. On the Dynamo system, the facility of carving was appropriated in various ways. For example, as well as being used as an access-control mechanism for prepared content, it was also used in playful games and friendly teasing, which users were observed to enjoy. (cf. Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2). On a broader scale, the Dynamo system as a whole offered flexible facilities for display, sharing and arrangement. This was appropriated to be a surface for giving performances to groups, for enticing social interaction with friends, and for furnishing group

to be deployed – and adopted – in real world environments, which means they need to be backwards compatible with legacy technology. Borovoy (2001) makes a similar point, and states that when users took the “Thinking Tag” devices home with them (away from the “Community Mirror” Community Display system), they were not compatible with normal PCs or any other devices, rendering them useless. He refers to this as the “lost horizons” problem, problem, after Capra’s 1938 film (Borovoy, 2001; p.44).

OG2: Design Suggestion for on-going settings Be inclusive to potential users by supporting a range of legacy technologies In order to facilitate critical mass, many different types of users and their personal technologies need to be catered for. A survey of the user group can reveal their use of legacy technologies and inform the design of the system. In other words, don’t forget about the “less exciting” users who use dated equipment – they are crucial users because they contribute to the critical mass and thus can determine whether a system is successfully adopted by a community.

in which people spend time – such as seating areas, rather than just the focal points of flow as is the case in one-shot settings. Another differentiating quality of on-going settings is that users are more likely to have a sense of ownership of the content they put on the Community Display than compared to one-shot settings. For example, rather than relating to a game-like ice-breaker activity, the content may be work-related, or the user may have spent time and effort preparing the item to share with the community. As such, users require the ability to prevent others from stealing or accidentally manipulating their content; as shown in the user studies reported in Chapter 5, sections 5.4.1 and 5.4.2.

OG3: Design Suggestion for on-going settings Provide access control for owned content In on-going usage settings, content is likely to be owned by users, and is typically less trivial than that used on Community Displays in one-shot settings. This creates a requirement for access control features. Specifically, if users are able to connect their own devices or file stores,

number of users tend to pass through, not as a prescriptive progression – users move through this at their own discretion. Within the pale orange box on the right hand side is a representation of  usage of the display. A user can engage in an interaction at any level of  engagement that suits them, and through any available entry point. The main difference compared to one-shot settings is that members here use the space regularly in their daily lives, and thus are exposed to it while doing their everyday activities. It may be the case that upon their very first exposure to the Community Display, the one-shot interaction model (Figure 8.1) applies to an extent, but this first time exposure makes up a very small proportion of their use of the space thereafter.

Figure 8.2: Interaction model for on-going settings

213

Overseeing and peripheral involvement was observed to occur slightly differently in the on-going setting as compared to the one-shot setting. There was a diversity of other activities that people carried out simultaneously in the communal space. For example, people would study quietly, read books, work in groups, socialize, drink coffee together, eat lunch or snacks, or have meetings at the same time, creating “multifocused gatherings” (Goffman, 1963) which occurred on a regular basis. While being involved in these other activities, community members would often be involved with the Community Display interactions at various different levels of engagement  (shown in orange in Figure 8.2, and detailed in Section

7.4.2 of Chapter 7). For example, low levels of engagement included bodily reactions such as turning to face the display when something interesting was being shown, or “bobbing” appreciatively in time with music being played. Higher levels of engagement included brief, low effort vocalizations such as “ahh”, “ohh” and “wow”, which were termed “chirping”; and at a slightly

registered, or not registered; they could initiate an interaction with any kind of compatible personal device, or with no personal device at all; they could enter an interaction with a group and gain a range of different kinds support from people using the other interaction points, or they could interact alone and independently. These entry points allowed a user to engage in an interaction with Dynamo that suited their level of expertise and the level of  engagement that they sought. It also allowed spontaneous usage, since it enabled a wide range of usage scenarios, rather than requiring users to plan an interaction around a limited set of entry points. For example, if every user needed to be registered to interact, achieving a group interaction would require planful-ness and effort to arrive at the entry point in which each user is registered, which could deter usage. This leads on to the following design suggestion:

OG5: Design Suggestion for on-going settings Support gradual buy-in by offering a wide array of entry points. Gradual buy-in is a key process by which many users learn about and

tea time, a daily scheduled time when people gather in the lounge area.” (p. 1)

Houde et al. carried out a field study on themselves and the other people they shared a building with, by deploying the NewsLens in the shared kitchen area. They reported a number of positive findings. For example, community members expressed that it was fun to read, they liked the fact that they didn’t need to go to a special place, either physically or “virtually” (on the intranet) in order to discover news, and they also preferred it to receiving group emails. However, the field study also revealed adoption problems. After an initial wave of enthusiasm, usage dropped off a great deal: “ Not many stories were posted… approximately two stories per day” (p. 3). They were left unsure as to the exact cause of this, postulating that the system may have simply have been too time consuming for the community to fit into their busy working days.

Also, the submission to the display had to be done via email. Given the early year of this research (1998), it is not surprising that they did not offer additional facilities for technology interconnection, Indeed, devices such as PDAs, digital cameras and wireless laptops were not even in popular use at that time. Nonetheless, this limitation had a certain impact on the adoption of the system, since users were required to return to their workstations and write the news item from there. This meant that users needed to leave the communal space and return to their workstations in order to add an item to the Community Display. The effort involved may effectively have closed an entry point for many of the users who, upon seeing the information displayed or upon having an interesting conversation in the communal space, might “there and then” wish to post up an item onto the display, with their colleagues immediately available to help and give feedback. Having to return to a personal workstation with a relatively small screen would also would have hindered the social and cooperative aspect of item

dissemination of journalistic news stories, and more for more for informal and low effort media sharing. This analysis has shown that the concepts and interaction model put forward for on-going settings can be useful in making sense of study findings and suggesting improvements for iterative redesign. This chapter has discussed the contributions of this thesis in depth, first looking at the general phenomena of situated social behaviour around Community Displays, and then looking consecutively the specific voluntary adoption issues relating to one-shot and on-going settings. The following chapter will provide suggestions for future work and the final f inal conclusions of  the thesis.

Chapter 9 Conclusions and Future Work

9.1 Introduction

220

9.2 Reflection

220

9.3 Future work

222

9.3.1 Beyond the one-shot / on-going setting characterisation 9.3.2 Future avenues of Community Display adoption research

9.4 Final Conclusions

222 225

228

9.1 Introduction This chapter will begin by reflecting on the work as a whole, recounting the research narrative, and making suggestions for different ways it could have been carried out, given the benefit of hindsight. Secondly, this chapter discusses some important avenues for future research in this area. Thirdly and finally, this chapter will draw the final conclusions, summarizing the main contributions of the thesis to field of Community Display research.

9.2 Reflection The outset of this research began with the general motivation to understand Community Display systems and the sociotechnical issues relating to their usage. From this, the problem of voluntary adoption revealed itself to be an important concern – contemporary researchers in the area were producing a range of technically impressive Community Display systems, yet many systems suffered from voluntary adoption issues (e.g. Carter et al., 2002;

setting: “one shot”, which were temporary settings used by loose-knit communities; and “on-going”, which were permanent settings used by tightknit communities. Drawing upon this characterization, a research approach was drawn up, which entailed a series of three case-studies. The first case-study was intended to ground the research by looking at a large display used by a team of conference technicians. Although they did not use an actual Community Display system, this case-study enabled the investigation of the social properties of a physically large display used by an established community. This proved to be a fruitful endeavor, since analysis of the field study observations gave rise to an understanding of the spatial distribution of  interaction, flow, overseeing, and the honey-pot effect. From an analysis of  the field study, the Wall-loader prototype was developed. During development on a desktop computer, this prototype seemed to be an effective design. However, when it was deployed in the target communal

deployment settings. Thus Opinionizer could have been deployed in an ongoing communal space, and observed over a period of weeks; while Dynamo could have been deployed at a one-shot event such a conference. These additional studies could have provided an even better understanding of the interplay between design, functions, voluntary adoption and types of  setting. However, given that this would require substantially more work, it is more a case for future work. The following section will go into more detail on some of these issues, discussing the limitations of the research reported in this thesis and proposing a number of avenues for future research in this area.

9.3 Future work 9.3.1 Beyond the one-shot / on-going setting characterisation The characterization of “one shot” and “on going” settings has shown itself 

like a one-shot setting. However, the community are familiar with each other, and with all the established social norms, activities and practices that are carried out in their normal setting This produces a different blend of  requirements for the Community Display. For example, it may be beneficial to offer some of the characteristics of a Community Display for on-going settings, allowing users to engage in freeform activities with each other, rather than encouraging them to engage in a simple pre-packaged activity to encourage them to associate with each other. However, it is also important for them to discover and learn how to use the Community Display within the time available to them, which is a characteristic found in one-shot settings. This would no doubt present a number of dilemmas to the system designers, and is a valuable avenue for future work. Another complexity not considered in this thesis is that the people present in a communal space may be from a number of different communities and subcommunities. For example, in the common room observed in the Dynamo

area of community social network structure and interconnection (e.g. Wellman and Berkowitz, 1988; Wasserman and Faust, 1994) presents itself  as an interesting avenue for this future work, providing an alternative way which to look at settings, design issues, and the effects a Community Display may have on a community. In the Dynamo study in an on-going setting, the findings of both the preliminary and main field study show that the community members were comfortable acting very extrovertly and socializing openly with anyone who cared to engage with them. This can be attributed partly due to the fact that the community was close-knit and there was much trust between the members. Had Dynamo been deployed in an on-going setting where the community was loose-knit, such as a café with no regular clientele, where there was less familiarity and trust between people, members may not have been so comfortable behaving so openly and doing things on a large display that any stranger could watch and listen in to. Here the public availability of 

engage in a private interaction, but if they were at a social event at the same venue at another time, they might be happy using the large wall display and might welcome open interaction from the people around them. In such a scenario, the displays in the environment might offer a generic display service, which users could appropriate and run Community Display applications on if they wished to, as proposed by Black et al. (2002, 2003). This presents itself as an interesting avenue for future work, i.e. looking at how Community Displays would exist in a wider world of Ubiquitous Computing devices, and the implications this would have for their design, usage and voluntary adoption.

9.3.2 Future avenues of Community Display adoption research - The need for longitudinal studies in investigating on-going settings In the research area of appropriation and “evolving use of groupware” (e.g.

effects, and the long term processes of appropriation. In such studies, a different observational methodology would be used in comparison to the Dynamo field study. Instead of a 10 day intense study in which video is recorded continuously, a spread out method of sampling would be more suitable, in which occasional video or observational sessions are carried out, (e.g. twice a month spread over a year), and system logs are used to provide the day-to-day detail. These longer term studies will be an important addition to the mix of studies being carried out on Community Display systems. Indeed, as Andriessen et al. (2003) state below, maintaining a healthily mix of different styles of  studies, theories and methodologies is important to the development of a well rounded understanding of the phenomena of adoption: “According to our viewpoint, diversity is the mother of  knowledge. Theoretical and methodical comparison of the results of various approaches should reveal the richness of the

the field of Community Display research is nascent, this possibility is still a long way off.

- The need to report adoption problems. As noted the literature review in Chapter 2, details of the adoption problems reported in many Community Display research publications tend to be sparse, often with a greater emphasis on positive findings. It is hard to judge whether this is in part due to a desire for the report to cast the innovation in a good light. This bias can take the form of “observer bias”, when the researchers unwittingly perceive the observational data as supporting their hypotheses (Reber & Reber, 2001), and as “publication bias” when publication reviewers give preference to a certain kind of finding (cf. Eysenbach, 2004). In the field of adoption and appropriation research, there is a marked

•

Marketing and Consumer Psychology

Concerned with facilitating the uptake of commercial products with a view to commercial success (e.g. Kotler & Armstrong, 2004; Moore, 1991; Underhill, 2002). •

Technology life-cycles and Usability

Concerned with the manner a technology’s user groups progress from “early adopters” through to “laggards” and the targeting of  features and achievement of usability for the different needs of these groups (e.g. Norman, 1998; Rogers, 1968; Moore, 1991). •

The diffusion of innovation

Concerned with the way in which innovative ideas spread through communities and cultures, e.g. agricultural, medial, technological or any other domain (e.g. Rogers, 1968; Arnould, 1989; Fleck, 2000) Each of these different perspectives of adoption research have a much to

this problem, and has proposed suggestions for minimizing it through attention to the social setting and the system design. Overarching conceptual contributions which were found to apply across all the setting studies were the concepts of “ user flow” and “ the honey-pot effect”. As people moved through the space and engaged in other activities (“flow”), they would oversee usage of the Community Display, owing to its large size and prominent positioning, which often would serve to spontaneously entice them into a social interaction with those people (“the honey-pot effect”). This served to foster spontaneous group congregations in which informal social interaction would take take place. place.

Overseeing also played a very very

important role in enabling vicarious learning, a process by which community members would learn about the Community Display by watching others using it. Another key contribution of this thesis was the characterisation of two kinds of communal space setting: “ one-shot” and “on-going”. One-shot usage

to learn more about it, and the second, the “ threshold to interaction” involves them deciding to interact with it directly. These thresholds are key points at which a user may decide whether or not to interact, and are posed as a key focus of attention for designers of any Community Displays for one-shot settings. However, this model is particular to one-shot settings, owing to the short window of time a user has available to discover, understand and choose to use a Community Display. The design suggestions put forward relate to encouraging users to cross these two different thresholds, and achieving the all-important first time usage of the system. Voluntary adoption problems in on-going settings are found to relate to the achievement of repeat usage over an extended period of time, and the appropriation of the system into community practices. Owing to the fact that these spaces are used for a variety of other daily activities, community members tend to learn about the system incidentally, while going about these other activities. This also has a major element of vicarious learning,

requiring any unnecessary jumps in investment in the system as they learn, and also and offering flexibility of the system functions to cater for community appropriation, enabling them to use the system for the activities that they prefer. To conclude, the interaction models and concepts put forward in this thesis provide the beginnings of a framework or lingua franca for researchers and system designers, enabling them to better understand the interplay between the settings, the social behaviour, the voluntary adoption and the design issues that are at work in the design, use and appropriation of Community Displays.

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Appendix 1 Interview questions used in Opinionizer Study 2

A1.1 Semi-structured interview A1.1.1 Background The interview technique used was semi-structured. As such, the questions listed below were used to guide the interview, but the interviewer also had scope to pursue questioning on issues of interest. Responses were written down by the interviewer, since the ambient noise in the environment was too loud for audio recording devices.

A1.2 Interview Questions A1.2.1 Participant briefing Instruction to interviewer: express that the interview is only ten quick  questions and will only take 2 minutes of their time. Also, state that as a reward you will pay them with chocolate.

3) Did you watch others using it first before having a go yourself? Did it look easy or complicated to use? 4) Did you begin a conversation with anyone while standing near Opinionizer? Did you know them before hand? If so, did you know them well, vaguely or by sight? 5) (For non-users) Why didn’t you try Opinionizer? Were you aware of its existence? Did you know what it was? Did you watch others using it and then feel it was not for you? 6) Did you find relaxing to use Opinionizer or was there an element of  anxiety? How did you feel about other people watching you while you were using it? 7) What encouraged you to have a go on Opinionizer? Why? 8) What, in your opinion, was the one best and the one worst aspect of  Opinionizer?

Appendix 2 Materials used in Dynamo Study

A2.1 Participant Consent Forms & Disclaimer _______________ 264 A2.1.1 In Loco Parentis Consent form ____________________________ 264

A2.1 Participant Consent Forms & Disclaimer

A2.1.1 In Loco Parentis Consent form The form on the following page is the ‘in loco parentis’ consent form. This was for the head teacher to sign, as a legal guardian of the students while at the school.

IN LOCO PARENTIS – DYNAMO STUDY CONSENT FORM

By signing below you are indicating that you are an ‘in loco parentis’ guardian of the students at Blatchington Mill Sixth Form college, and that you understand and agree with the following terms and conditions: [1] The Dynamo researchers will be recording video in i n the 6 th form common room of students using or carrying out activities near the Dynamo system. [2] Images or segments form these videos could be used by the researchers in the reporting of the study to the academic community. This might be in the form of academic papers, conference presentations and project website content. [3] Pseudonyms will be used to identify individuals in any publications and materials beyond initial data collection. Their real named identities will not be revealed. If you desire for the school to remain anonymous please this indicate to us and we will not identify the school in any publications or materials beyond initial data collection. I would like for for the school to remain anonymous: anonymous: YES / NO appropriate)

(delete as

[4] The researchers will not use content from this video in any other public

DATE:

A2.1.2 Participant Consent form The following form explained to potential participants the nature of the study, that participation was voluntary, the data collected was confidential, they could ask any questions they liked, and they were free to leave and change their participation agreement at any time without needing to give a reason. It also explained that their names would not be published, and instead pseudonyms would be used.

Blatchington Mill Informed Consent Form By signing below, I confirm hereby that I am participating voluntarily i n this technology field study, and that I understand the following terms & conditions: (1) I may be video taped while using or nearby the Dynamo system. (2) These images could be used by the researchers when they report on this study to the academic community, e.g., in academic papers and on the project web page. My real name will not be used in any reporting of this work. (3) These images will not be used in any other public non-academic forum without your explicit consent. (4) I can choose to withdraw from the study at any time without penalty. (5) I have read and signed a copy of the Dynamo Disclaimer document, document, which states that I take full personal responsibility for any actions I carry out when using the Dynamo system. If you have any questions about this study, please contact Harry Brignull

A2.1.3 Disclaimer Form The form on the following page is the legal disclaimer, which details how that when signed, the participants take full responsibility for their actions while using Dynamo, such as the sharing of copyrighted materials and the posting of anti-social or obscene materials on Dynamo.

DYNAMO LEGAL DISCLAIMER Please sign at the bottom to indicate that you have read this document and understand it. The Universities of Sussex and Nottingham do not condone activities and actions that breach the rights of copyright owners. It is your responsibility to obey all laws governing copyright materials and property. The Universities of Sussex and Nottingham respect copyright and other laws. Be warned in the event a user of Dynamo fails to comply with laws governing copyrighted property such user may be exposed to criminal or civil liability which may include possible fines or imprisonment.

DO NOT VIEW OR DOWNLOAD COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS WITHOUT THE OWNER'S PERMISSION.

DO NOT VIEW OR DOWNLOAD FILES THAT ARE BE ILLEGAL OR CONTRAVENE THE RULES OF BLATCHINGTON MILL 6TH FORM COLLEGE. THIS INCLUDES OBSCENE AND OFFENSIVE MATERIAL.

By signing this disclaimer you are indicating that you take full personal responsibility for your actions when using or acting in relation to the Dynamo system. You are also agreeing to indemnify and hold the Universities of Sussex and Nottingham and its agents and employees harmless from any claim or demand, including reasonable solicitors fees made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the Dynamo system.

A2.2 Preliminary Survey The preliminary survey was given out during the preliminary observational study carried out prior to the deployment of Dynamo. It is shown on the following pages.

Quick Questionnaire Questionnaire

Thanks for agreeing to do our quick questionnaire We really appreciate your support! This should take you less than 5 minutes to

On average, how long do you use computers for each day? 0-1hrs

2-3hrs

3-4hrs

4-5hrs

5-6hrs

6-7hrs 

Please state whether you regularly do each of the following activities. Activity Mobile Phone Voice Calls SMS messages MMS messages (containing images, video, sounds or ringtones) Bluetooth-based file exchange using mobile phones (e.g. images, video, sound or ringtones) Text emails Email attachments

YES

NO

Please state whether you regularly use  each of the following devices while at  college . Device Non MMS capable Mobile Phone MMS capable mobile phone Laptop PDA (eg Palm, Ipaq) Digital Still Camera

YES

NO

Your Personal Details Please note: this information is kept completely confidential

Your Name Gender Age Email (Optional - used only to send you occasional messages about Dynamo over the next 2 weeks or so)

Courses studied

A2.3 Post Hoc Survey The post hoc survey was given out at the end of the study in order to ascertain details of participant use and opinion. It is shown on the following pages.

Second Quick Questionnaire

Thanks for agreeing to do our second quick questionnaire - We really appreciate your support! This should take you less than 5 minutes to complete.

When did you first use Dynamo? Friday 5th

Monday 8th

Tuesday 9th

Monday Tuesday Wednesday 15th 16th 17th

Wednesday Thursday Friday 10th 11th 12th

Thursday 18th

Did you register a pen drive (or any other device) with Dynamo? Yes

No 

Could you give a reason for why you used Dynamo the amount you did?

Please rate your current familiarity with Dynamo:

Could say in two sentences how you think Dynamo effected life in the common room?

A2.4 Instruction leaflet The leaflet shown on the following two pages was made available in a prominent leaflet dispenser next to the Dynamo installation. Please note that it has been scaled down to fit on this page.

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