Roles of an Interactive Media Façade in a Digital Agora

As a component of urban civic infrastructures, interactive screen technology is often studied, designed and produced top-down style to accommodate the diverging interests of its stakeholders. However, some HCI researchers are calling for new interaction design strategies that could help close the gap between top-down and bottom-up approaches in the study of situated interfaces used for civic engagement. Our paper reports on the public deployment of an interactive platform that might anticipate this next generation of situated interfaces. In Fall 2013, we conducted a ten-week qualitative field evaluation of Mégaphone, a digitally-augmented agora deployed in Montréal's Quartier des Spectacles. Using ethnographic research methods, we collected data in-the-wild and conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with over 21 participants to understand why and how urbanites used the installation. This paper presents five conceptual categories that describe the most salient forms of interaction that we observed between users and Mégaphone's voice-activated media façade.