Influencing the Experience of People in Urban Public Places through Mobile Mediated Interactions

2009-2011

Abstract

This study will produce research findings to inform the design and development of innovative mobile services aiming to enable people to interact with collocated people in urban public spaces. The main goal of this research is to provide applications and deliver guidelines to positively influence the user experience of different public urban places during everyday urban life. This study will design and trial mobile content and services enabling mobile mediated interactions in an anonymous way.

The research described in this thesis is twofold. First, this study investigates how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be utilised in particular urban public places to influence the experience of urban dwellers during everyday life. The research into urban residents and public places guides the design of three different applications that form case studies to investigate and discover possibilities to digitally augment the public urban space and make the invisible data of our interactions in the urban environment visible.

  • Capital Music enables urban dwellers to listen to their music on their mobile devices as usual but also visualises the artworks of songs currently being played and listened to by other users in ones’ vicinity.
  • PlaceTagz uses QR codes printed on stickers that link to a digital message board enabling collocated users to interact with each other over time resulting in a place-based digital memory.
  • Sapporo World Window is an interactive content application for urban screens that allows people to share their creativity and knowledge about places around Sapporo. It employs mobile phones to mediate mobile interactions.

Second, this study sets out to explore the quality and nature of the experiences created through the developed and deployed case study applications. The development of a user experience framework for evaluating mobile mediated interactions in urban public places is described and applied within each case.

Team

Partners

Publications

Seeburger, J., Foth, M., & Tjondronegoro, D. W. (2010). Capital music : personal expression with a public display of song choice. Paper presented at the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. (eprints>)

Seeburger, J., & Schroeter, R. (2009, Nov 23-27). Disposable Maps: Ad hoc Location Sharing. In J. Kjeldskov, J. Paay & S. Viller (Eds.), Proceedings OZCHI 2009 (pp. 377-380). Melbourne, VIC: The University of Melbourne. (eprints >)