Designing Interfaces to Experience Interactive Installations Together Claude Fortin and Kate Hennessy Making Culture Lab at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT) Surrey, British Columbia cfortin@sfu.ca and hennessy_kate@sfu.ca Abstract Researchers at the Making Culture Lab use ethnographic methods to study how interactive technology supports digital practices in diverse cultural environments. This paper reports on how certain design aspects of display systems implemented in public space can induce social encounters and awareness. Field observations made since 2012 show that interface design may be a key factor in structuring such shared experiences. In 2014, HCI researchers introduced the Social Natural User Interfaces (Social NUIs) ana- lytical framework to help HCI practitioners design interfaces that better support collaboration and cooperation in co-located multi- user interaction scenarios. This study describes four interactive media façades deployed in Montréal’s Quartier des Spectacles to suggest that electronic artists intuitively anticipated the Social NUIs relational approach to interface design. Analyses highlight how the artists used crossmodal interfaces – also based on intui- tive modes of interaction such as gesture, touch, and speech – to design interactive installations that engage people beyond the ubiquitous single-user “social cocooning” interaction scenario. The aim of this research is to illustrate how artistic architectural- scale digital public display installations has the potential to paral- lel, drive, and contribute to, socially concerned design thinking. Keywords Interface design; interactive displays; crossmodality; natural user interfaces (NUIs); Social NUIs; public space; urban interventions. Introduction While Huhtamo traces the history of public media displays to Ancient Rome, he further claims that it is the invention of electricity that saw dynamic displays and media façades make their appearance in public outdoor space. As far back as the nineteenth century, incandescent bulbs were used to illuminate advertising billboards while magic lanterns were used to project images on screen surfaces, walls, and pub- lic monuments. [1] Although today, these media platforms are electronically engineered, they often tend to serve simi- lar purposes; typically, they are used to publicize commer- cial content, news, and location-relevant information. Likewise, Manovich argues that digital technology has borrowed from older traditional forms – such as print and cinema – to remediate new media objects into cultural in- terfaces, a concept he defines as computerized screens that encode culture in digital form. [2] Because digital screens can now be used to mediate action and control, the design of cultural interfaces presents significant challenges with all new implications that reach far beyond issues of repre- sentation. [3] A case in point is how unleashing their inter- active potential at the scale of the built environment might redefine people’s everyday experience of the city. Relatedly, contemporary artists are using the crossmodal properties of new media to experiment with large display installations as a media platform that can transform percep- tions from one sensory modality to another. [4] For in- stance, MindWind uses ambient traffic noise (audio input) to trigger movement in an architectural-scale video projec- tion (visual output). [5] The artist’s stated intention is to use “elements that are part of our everyday environment to reconnect people to their sense of place.” [6] Mediating one sense-impression into another also evokes an invisible link between the natural world and the transcendental. Since 2012, the Making Culture Lab has been investigat- ing such creative uses of dynamic digital displays in public space with a focus on understanding how new media artists are harnessing the interactive medium-specific potentials of screen-based systems to induce new forms of encounters and awareness. Field findings show that interface design may be a key factor in structuring such shared experiences. Recently, the Social Natural User Interfaces (Social NUIs) analytical framework was introduced to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) to help practitioners design interfaces that better support collaboration and co- operation in co-located multi-user interaction scenarios. [7] Social NUIs support a relational approach to interface de- sign against the deeply ingrained technocentric orientations that have largely driven this research in past decades. This case study describes four interactive media façades deployed in Montréal’s Quartier des Spectacles to suggest that new media artists anticipated the Social NUIs relation- al approach to interface design in their screen-based art- work. In so doing, they may have paralleled, driven, and contributed to socially concerned design thinking by con- ceiving crossmodal interfaces that invite and engage peo- ple to experience interactive installations together. Qualitative Field Study Since 2012, we have been applying a multi-sited approach to the study of interactive media in public space with a focus on investigating the creative uses of dynamic digital displays. Our objective is to gather field data that will help