Curmi, Franco and Ferrario, Maria Angela Felicita Cristina and Whittle, Jonathan Nicholas David (2017) Embedding a Crowd inside a Relay Baton : A Case Study in a Non-Competitive Sporting Activity. In: CHI '17 Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems :. ACM, New York, pp. 2359-2370. ISBN 9781450346559
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Abstract
This paper presents a digital relay baton that connects long-distance runners with distributed online spectators. Such baton broadcasts athletes’ live locative data to a social network and communicates back remote-crowd support through haptic and audible cheers. Our work takes an exploratory design approach to bring new insights into the design of real-time techno-mediated social support. The prototype was deployed during a 170-mile charity relay race across the UK with 13 participants, 261 on-line supporters, and collected a total of 3153 ‘cheers’. We report on the insights collected during the design and deployment process and identify three fundamental design considerations: the degree of expressiveness afforded by the system design, the context applicability, and the data flow within the social network