Designing for bystanders: reflections on building a public digital forum

Tang, A., Finke, M., Blackstock, M., Leung, R., Deutscher, M., and Lea, R. (2008). Designing for bystanders: reflections on building a public digital forum. In CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 879--882.

Abstract

In this paper, we reflect on the design and deployment process of MAGICBoard, a public display deployed in a university setting that solicits the electronic votes and opinions of bystanders on trivial but amusing topics. We focus on the consequences of our design choices with respect to encouraging bystanders to interact with the public display. Bystanders are individuals around the large display who may never fully engage with the application itself, but are potential contributors to the system. Drawing on our recent experiences with MAGICBoard, we present a classification of bystanders, and then discuss three design themes relevant to the design of systems for bystander use: graduated proximal engagement, lowering barriers for interaction and supporting covert engagement.

Materials

PDF File (http://hcitang.org/papers/2008-chi2008-designing-for-bystanders.pdf)
DOI (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357193)

Keywords

bystanders, large display groupware, large displays, mobile computing, sms

BibTeX

@inproceedings{tang2008designing,
  year = {2008},
  type = {conference},
  title = {Designing for bystanders: reflections on building a public digital forum},
  publisher = {ACM},
  pdfurl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2008-chi2008-designing-for-bystanders.pdf},
  pages = {879--882},
  location = {Florence, Italy},
  keywords = {bystanders, large display groupware, large displays, mobile computing,
sms},
  isbn = {978-1-60558-011-1},
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357193},
  date-modified = {2014-01-17 04:57:29 +0000},
  booktitle = {CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems},
  author = {Tang, Anthony and Finke, Mattias and Blackstock, Michael and Leung, Rock
and Deutscher, Meghan and Lea, Rodger},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  abstract = {In this paper, we reflect on the design and deployment process of MAGICBoard,
a public display deployed in a university setting that solicits the electronic
votes and opinions of bystanders on trivial but amusing topics. We focus on
the consequences of our design choices with respect to encouraging bystanders
to interact with the public display. Bystanders are individuals around the
large display who may never fully engage with the application itself, but are
potential contributors to the system. Drawing on our recent experiences with
MAGICBoard, we present a classification of bystanders, and then discuss three
design themes relevant to the design of systems for bystander use: graduated
proximal engagement, lowering barriers for interaction and supporting covert
engagement. },
}