From interaction to performance in public displays

The experience of interacting with a public display is more than what happens between a single person and the system. Participating in an interactive experience is also about how one person's actions are experienced by others, and how the person interacting with a public display is aware of others seeing his or her encounter with the display or seeing the results of the encounter. This raises the question of how people experience each other through public displays. In this dissertation, I use performance as an analytical lens for understanding people's experiences with public displays and explore how displays shift social interaction through their mediation. By performance, I am referring to a situation in which someone is performing actions in front of others who may or may not necessarily be co-present. I present the design and installation of three public displays: rhythIMs, a public display that visualizes patterns of instant messaging and physical presence for a collocated group of people; mopix, a mobile photo sharing system through which people can share photos taken with their mobile phones on a set of distributed public displays; and entrigue, a simple, lightweight photo display that captures the comings and goings in a home. To understand interaction with public displays, I use three related notions of collectives—audiences, groups and publics—to highlight the ways in which people orient to each other through public displays, I demonstrate that there are multiple, heterogeneous audiences and show how people experience these different types of collectives in different ways. I illustrate how public displays mediate performances that take place across spatial and temporal boundaries, influence people to identify collectives, relate to how much they did or did not see themselves as part of particular collectives, and consider their commonalities and differences within them.