Public displays for public participation in urban settings: a survey Guiying Du Institute for Geoinformatics Muenster, Germany guiying.du@uni-muenster.de Auriol Degbelo Institute for Geoinformatics Muenster, Germany degbelo@uni-muenster.de Christian Kray Institute for Geoinformatics Muenster, Germany c.kray@uni-muenster.de ABSTRACT Public displays can be used to support public participation in urban settings. This article provides a survey of the use of public displays for public participation in an urban con- text, covering articles on this topic published between 2012 and 2016. 36 papers were selected and analysed along eight dimensions: type of political context, type of scientific contri- bution, standalone displays vs displays with a device, single vs multi-purpose displays, shape of displays, lab vs field study, deployment in public vs semi-public space, and the level of public participation addressed. Our analysis revealed a number of trends regarding public displays and public participation in urban settings. Inspecting these articles also led to the observa- tion that current research on public displays is mainly targeting lower levels of public participation and that the evaluation of public displays for public participation in urban settings re- mains a challenge. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2. User Interfaces: Theory and Method Author Keywords Public display; citizen engagement; public participation; urban setting. INTRODUCTION Nowadays a wide range of online technologies are available for public particiation, such as e-mail, web forums, chat rooms and bulletin boards [14]. However, due to the private nature of these tools, parts of the population may become marginalized if facts and informations about urban life were only delivered through these channels. Public displays are a technology that has the potential to transform our urban environments and to dramatically change current city life [28, 41]. Specifically, they can be used to encourage local participation by informing citizens about available opportunities – in their immediate vicinity – to contribute to the urban life. As Goncalves et al. [19] pointed out, public displays are useful in generating interest in a particular topic, and in channeling respondents to other mediums. There is already some research exploring Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. PerDis ’17, June 07-09, 2017, Lugano, Switzerland © 2017 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-5045-7/17/06. . . $15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3078810.3078825 a variety of ways to stimulate public participation amongst certain communities, e.g., through a sentiment dashboard that gives citizens the opportunity to express their mood about lo- cal challenges [6], by collecting citizens’ feedback via voting systems [11, 35] or by using tangible interaction to explore different forms of community engagement [12]. Public dis- plays as pervasive technologies have the potential to reach a broader group of stakeholders. The well-known honeypot effect [9] is one factor that public displays can use to draw more attention from potential participants. However, up to now there has been comparatively little research looking into how public displays are used for public participation in urban settings. This is the main motivation for the present work as it reports on a systematic literature survey on this topic. Public participation can be defined in different ways. Through- out this article, we will use the definition from the European Institute for Public Participation [16], which defines public participation as: “the deliberative process by which interested or affected citizens, civil society organisations, and govern- ment actors are involved in policy-making before a politi- cal decision is taken. By deliberation we mean a process of thoughtful discussion based on the giving and taking of rea- sons for choices”. This definition emphasizes the involvement of stakeholders to come to a shared understanding of issues and solutions. While public participation can bring great value to all stakeholders, more efforts are needed to facilitate public participation and realize its full potential. Developing and emerging information technologies have great potential to sup- port citizen participation in decision-making processes [20]. As one kind of information technology, public displays have proven to be able to facilitate participation opportunities for citizens through interactions such as questionnaires, voting, and discussion via simple text entry [23, 37, 6]. In this paper, we report on a survey on the current develop- ment of public displays for supporting public participation in urban environments. We focus on studies published on the ACM digital library between 2012 to 2016, and try to give a thorough analysis of the papers surveyed to give some inspi- ration for future research on public displays in this context. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we provide a review of recent research progress of using public displays for public participation in urban settings by analysing various research dimensions of public displays in these papers. Second, we summarise the challenges and opportunities for future studies on achieving higher levels of public participation by using public displays.