Considering the Evaluation and Design of (Public) Situated Displays: Enabling Users to Choose Amongst Different Design Alternatives In-situ

1. Introduction In this position paper we explore some of the issues surrounding the evaluation of public situated displays. We discuss how and more importantly what we hope to achieve through our evaluation of such systems. Sometimes we may wish to evaluate against some kind of performance metric, however, often the evaluation goal is less tractable, e.g. how a public display system may support notions of community or how information flows in an organisation can be distributed. Furthermore, our !"#$%&$'()*+,)-,.&/%(0,1('&$'"2,2(1.%$31,involves obtaining feedback from the user which may then be used in participatory design workshops. However, the number of participants of such workshops is typically limited and other approaches for supporting participatory design may be necessary. In this paper we propose an approach that we feel may help encourage users who encounter and use one of our public displays to reflect more on the design possibilities that may be available and, we hypothesise, be more likely to provide explicit feedback. The main idea of this approach is to allow users to choose amongst different design alternatives in-situ, thus enabling them to explore the design space by themselves.