Designing Media Architecture: Tools and Approaches for Addressing the Main Design Challenges Peter Dalsgaard 1 , Kim Halskov 1 , Alexander Wiethoff 2 1 CAVI – Interaction Design, Aarhus University, Denmark 2 University of Munich (LMU), Germany halskov@cavi.au.dk, dalsgaard@cavi.au.dk, alexander.wiethoff@ifi.lmu.de Figure 1. Three cases of Media Architecture design for the public domain, in different contexts: (a.) Orkhêstra, (b.) HBK Media Façade, and (c.) Expo 2010. ABSTRACT Media Architecture is reaching a level of maturity at which we can identify tools and approaches for addressing the main challenges for HCI practitioners working in this field. While previous influential contributions within Media Architecture have identified challenges for designers and offered case studies of specific approaches, here, we (1) provide guidance on how to tackle the domain-specific challenges of Media Architecture design – pertaining to the interface, integration, content, context, process, prototyping, and evaluation – on the basis of the development of numerous installations over the course of seven years, and thorough studies of related work, and (2) present five categories of tools and approaches – software tools, projection, 3D models, hardware prototyping, and evaluation tools – developed to address these challenges in practice, exemplified through six concrete examples from real-life cases. Author Keywords Media Architecture, Media Façades, Design Tools, Design Process, Urban Computing. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Although Media Architecture is a relatively new field, it has received much attention in the CHI community, to the extent that it is now maturing as a field of study and practice, with a dedicated ACM affiliated conference series [2, 3]. Early academic contributions to the field primarily offered case studies of specific installations [12, 13, 23, 26, 27]. As the number of Media Architecture installations has accrued, it has became possible to identify specific types of installations, for instance, the categorization of performative, allotted, and responsive ambient installations, identified by Hespanhol and Dalsgaard [17], recurring patterns of interactions, such as the honeypot effect [1], and the effect of spatial configurations on interaction [11]. Also, researchers have started to identify key challenges of designing Media Architecture installations. The most prominent example is that of Dalsgaard and Halskov [6], which outlines eight challenges pertaining to novel interfaces, integration, robustness, content, stakeholder involvement, situational diversity, social transformations, and emergent use, which have subsequently been expanded with three further challenges pertaining to design process models, technical expertise, and evaluation [29, 31]. As the specific challenges for designing in this field have become clear, recent research contributions have begun to examine tools and approaches tailored to address these challenges [15, 31]. However, an overview of these tools and approaches are lacking, and there has been no systematic integration of the tools and approaches with the identified challenges of designing Media Architecture. 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. CHI'16, May 07-12, 2016, San Jose, CA, USA © 2016 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-3362-7/16/05$15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858318 Interventions to Design Theory #chi4good, CHI 2016, San Jose, CA, USA 2562