Clinch, Sarah and Davies, Nigel (2013) Supporting user appropriation of public displays. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
Despite their prevalence, public engagement with pervasive public displays is typically very low. One method for increasing the relevance of displayed content (and therefore hopefully improving engagement) is to allow the viewer themselves to affect the content shown on displays they encounter – for example, personalising an existing news feed or invoking a specific application on a display of their choosing. We describe this process as viewer appropriation of public displays. This thesis aims to provide the foundations for appropriation support in future ‘open’ pervasive display networks. Our architecture combines three components: Yarely, a scheduler and media player; Tacita, a system for allowing users to make privacy-preserving appropriation requests, and Mercury, an application store for distributing content. Interface points between components support integration with thirdparty systems; a prime example is the provision of Content Descriptor Sets (CDSs) to describe the media items and constraints that determine what is played at each display. Our evaluation of the architecture is both quantitive and qualitative and includes a mixture of user studies, surveys, focus groups, performance measurements and reflections. Overall we show that it is feasible to construct a robust open pervasive display network that supports viewer appropriation. In particular, we show that Yarely’s thick-client approach enables the development of a signage system that provides continuous operation even in periods of network disconnection yet is able to respond to viewer appropriation requests. Furthermore, we show that CDSs can be used as an effective means of information exchange in an open architecture. Performance measures indicate that demanding personalisation scenarios can be satisfied, and our qualitative work indicates that both display owners and viewers are positive about the introduction of appropriation into future pervasive display systems.