From Interaction to Performance with Public Displays
Venue
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2014)
Publication Year
2014
Authors
Judy Chen, Paul Dourish, Gillian R. Hayes, Melissa Mazmanian
BibTeX
Abstract
Interacting with public displays involves more than what happens between
individuals and the system; it also concerns how people experience others around
and through those displays. In this paper, we use “performance” as an analytical
lens for understanding experiences with a public display called rhythIMs and
explore how displays shift social interaction through their mediation. By
performance, we refer to a situation in which people are on display and orient
themselves toward an audience that may be co-located, imagined, or virtual. To
understand interaction with public displays, we use two related notions of
collectives—audiences and groups—to highlight the ways in which people orient to
each other through public displays. Drawing examples from rhythIMs, a public
display that shows patterns of instant messaging and physical presence, we
demonstrate that there can be multiple, heterogeneous audiences and show how people
experience these different types of collectives in various ways. By taking a
performance perspective, we are able to understand how audiences that were not
physically co-present with participants still influenced participants’
interpretations and interactions with rhythIMs. This extension of the traditional
notion of audience illuminates the roles audiences can play in a performance.
