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From interaction to performance with public displays

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the GAANN Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, the ARCS Foundation, the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, and the National Science Foundation under award 0712890. We are grateful to the study participants and our colleagues at UCI for their feedback.

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  1. Judy Chen

    Present address: Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697-3440, USA

    Judy Chen, Paul Dourish, Gillian R. Hayes & Melissa Mazmanian

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  1. Judy Chen
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  2. Paul Dourish
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  3. Gillian R. Hayes
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  4. Melissa Mazmanian
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Correspondence to Judy Chen.

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Chen, J., Dourish, P., Hayes, G.R. et al. From interaction to performance with public displays. Pers Ubiquit Comput 18, 1617–1629 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-014-0764-5

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