The appropriation of a digital "speakers" corner
Claude A. Fortin, Carman Neustaedter, Kate Hennessy · 2014
Interactive digital technologies embedded in urban spaces typically tend to be used to deliver news, context-relevant information and commercial advertisements. To design urban technologies that will serve other ends, we first need to know how people might want to interact with them. Using an ethnographic approach, we collected field data in order to better understand this. This study presents some of the findings of our qualitative evaluation of MÉGAPHONE, an interactive artistic installation deployed in a public space in downtown Montréal, Canada. In this paper, we provide thick descriptions of our detailed field observations and interviews with participants conducted over the ten-week deployment with a deep focus on how users appropriated this system. Our results highlight four public interaction strategies as a set of abstractions that suggest how people might want to make use of interactive public installations: place-making, self-representing, first-person news reporting and bootstrapping online presence with digital recordings.