Screens in the Wild: Exploring the Potential of Networked Urban Screens for Communities and Culture Ava Fatah gen. Schieck 1 , Holger Schnädelbach 2 , Wallis Motta 1 , Moritz Behrens 1 , Steve North 2 , Lei Ye 2 , Efstathia Kostopoulou 1 1 The Bartlett, UCL London, WC1H 0NN UK 2 Mixed Reality Laboratory, UoN Nottingham, UK ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe our Research-in-the-Wild driven methodology to tackle a complex range of social, technical and interactional issues when implementing networked Urban Screens in London and Nottingham, UK [1]. The diversity of the local communities provides a unique opportunity for the research to examine interactions within the town centres, as well as UK-wide. General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. Keywords Urban Screens, Research in the Wild, Iterative design process. 1. INTRODUCTION Digital and interactive Urban Screens are becoming increasingly embedded into our architecture. They are already used for advertising, art, local information and global newsfeeds, as well as providing public viewing access to cultural and sporting events. More recently, they are networked allowing two-way remote communications [7, 13, 14]. As the technology progresses and cost decreases, broadcasters and commercial companies are making proposals for large screens in civic squares. In this respect, understanding issues of implementation for this technology and its impact on place and the quality of public experience is key. There is real potential for transformation of communities and culture through this digital infrastructure [4, 5]. However, the knowledge of how to enable the transformational power is lacking. It is simply that many questions about how the public will experience both the urban space and the interaction space enabled through this infrastructure remain unanswered. There is a need for robust and evidence-based methods as a first step towards understanding how the urban experience mediated through connected screens can be designed to augment real world interactions and how then connected Urban Screens could serve as an exchange platform between people in a range of cities and support novel forms of interactions that is relevant to the existing local and created online social communities. In response, the research challenge we address is how to best integrate a radical and potentially disruptive new technology into the urban realm. We addressed this through empirical collaborative research with our main partner; the London Borough of Waltham Forest. Concretely, we explored the placement, content creation, deployment and implications of an exemplar digitally connected Urban Screen network. Installed by the project in partner communities in London and Nottingham, this enabled the study of the potential to support communities and culture with the aim to maximise the quality of urban experience. ‘Research in the Wild’ allowed us to address the concerns of researchers, designers, urban designers, planners, and urban managers, community leaders and policy makers in their drive to encourage public participation and social cohesion. 2. METHODOLOGY Our approach is inherently cross-disciplinary bringing together methods from Architecture and HCI. We are working in ‘action research’ mode engaging research organisations with the end user communities [15]. Through an iterative prototyping methodology we aim to integrate the screen content development, placement, local interactivity and distributed connectivity of four screen nodes connecting Nottingham with London. This set-up allows us to explore remote connectivity by comparing two with three and four networked nodes, creating situations and experiences that differ in their urban settings and the types of populations they support through different seasons [2, 8]. Fig 1: The methodology (iterative design process) Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). PerDis '14, Jun 03-04 2014, Copenhagen, Denmark ACM 978-1-4503-2952-1/14/06. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2611009.2617199 Content Experience Urban Space Locality, sense of place Hardware/ Software Interactivity Engagement: Stakeholder public PERVASIVE DISPLAYS 2014 June 4th, 2014 – COPENHAGEN, DENMARK 166