Exploring participatory performance to inform the design of collaborative public interfaces

We describe a new application of interactive participatory performance in interaction design. Our pragmatic strategy permits us to use performance as an investigatory tool in the exploration of user behavior. By taking a holistic view of the evaluation of the interplay between the designed artifact (the performance content) and the people who interact and relate to it, we can extract insights from the performance with the intention of informing the process of designing interaction mechanisms for more conventional public interfaces.