Experiences of Supporting Local and Remote Mobile Phone Interaction in Situated Public Display Deployments - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 110

Table 1. Overview of deployments

Installed
From

Installed
Until

Number
Displays

Local
Interaction

Remote
Interaction

System Location Functionality

Office Doors
of Lancaster
University

March
2002

Asynchronous
Messaging

SMS, MMS,
Web, E-mail

Hermes July 2004 13 displays Touchscreen

Office Doors
of Lancaster
University

Asynchronous
Messaging

SMS, MMS,
Web, E-mail

Hermes II May 2006 present 40 displays Touchscreen

Hermes
Photo Dis-
play

Hallway of Lan-
caster University

June 2003 June 2004 1 display Sharing of Media Touchscreen MMS, E-mail

Hallways of
Münster Uni-
versity

Mobile Phone
(Java Applica-
tion)

October
2005

Textual Informa-
tion Sharing

Web, Email,
SMS

iDisplays present 12 displays

Post office in
Wray Village
near Lancaster

Touchscreen,
Mobile Phone
(Bluetooth)

Wray Photo
Display

August
2006

present 1 display Sharing of Media Web, E-mail

Mobile Phone
(Camera,
Bluetooth, Java
Application)

Retail Advertising/
Discount Coupons,
Navigation

September
2007

Streets in city
centre of Münster

MobiDiC present 20 displays Web

2007), where urban activities of users were tracked
with Bluetooth scanners.
The majority of systems built have been
evaluated only in lab settings and not in field
deployments. Therefore, there is little knowledge
to date regarding appropriation into everyday
life of systems that combine public displays and
mobile phones. This general bias has also been
identified generally in mobile HCI research
(Kjeldskov & Graham, 2003). The focussing on
usability issues only and ignoring appropriation
has come under increasing critique (Greenberg
& Buxton, 2008). Although the added value of
field studies for finding usability flaws can be
doubted (Kieldskov, Skov, Als, & Høegh, 2004),
its unique applicability to study appropriation has
been shown (Rogers et al., 2007). For the related
field of Ambient Displays, Skog (2006) has shown
that many interesting aspects can only be observed
from longitudinal field studies. For public dis-
plays, Huang, Mynatt and Trimble (2007) have
shown that the challenges of the real world lead

to unexpected usage patterns that probably cannot
be predicted from lab experiments.

CASE STUDIES

We now present six different field deployments in
and around the cities and universities of Münster
and Lancaster, which have allowed us to inves-
tigate appropriation from a number of different
angles (see Table 1).
The systems presented first have been installed
close to the researchers' offices, which enabled
continuous observation and easy access to the
user groups, but constrained users to a university
population. The latter systems have been installed
in sites remote from the researchers' offices, which
enabled investigation of different user populations
but also hindered continuous observation of the
displays.