Scaffolding Positive Engagements Between Strangers in Public Spaces
by Robert Zacharias
a thesis submitted on May 15, 2017
in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of
Master of Tangible Interaction Design
in the School of Architecture
at Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
an electronic version of this document is available at rzach.me/thesis
1 Contents
Abstract...... 3 Gratitude ...... 4 Background...... 5 Social theory ...... 5 People are happier when they’re connected, though they don’t know it . . . . .5 People distrust or dislike people from outside groups...... 10 Various measures of social connection show declines on small and large scales. . 11 Building installations for social purposes. . . . .12 Best practices for creating social connections ...... 12 Interactive objects in the public space. . 14 Selected prior art...... 19 Exhibits in museums that encourage social interaction...... 20 Interactive pieces in public spaces that encourage social interaction...... 24 Pieces in public spaces intended explicitly for social-good purposes ...... 27 Long-distance relationship building. . . .30 Original interactive pieces for novel engagement between strangers: process and product...... 32 Touchey Facey...... 32 Origins...... 33 Basic operation and user experience. . . 33 Development and technical notes. . . . 33 Start the Stop ...... 39 Origins and inspiration...... 39 Motivation and theory of operation . . . 40 Mechanical development ...... 42 A Better Mousetrap ...... 55 Origins and intention ...... 55 Interaction design ...... 56 Store selection...... 58 Caveats, questions, and next steps . . . 60 Results, interpretation, and next steps . . . . 62 Touchey Facey...... 62 Observed outcomes...... 62 Next steps...... 65 Start the Stop ...... 66 Observed outcomes...... 66 Next steps...... 71 Tying the threads together...... 72 Shifting the context...... 72 Advice to my past self...... 73 Bibliography ...... 75
2 Abstract
In this thesis I explore different ways of using tangible design elements to scaffold and encourage positive engagements between strangers in public spaces. The foundational idea is that given a carefully designed opportunity, people can be brought to have enriching shared experiences, even in places (such as waiting spaces in the public transit system) that normally inspire more boredom than joy. The purpose of these interventions is to increase social cohesion in the broader public, particularly across lines of race, class, urbanity, and politics. Three different pieces for interactive engagement are presented: Touchey Facey operates on an intimate centimeter scale of proximity and is predicated on physical contact in an usual way between two participants; Start the Stop operates in the several-meter scale of a bus stop and encourages strangers to cooperate in a creative task; and A Better Mousetrap, still in planning, will operate across a distance of kilometers and scaffold a cooperative mechanical building task bridging that span. For Touchey Facey and Start the Stop I discuss questions of design, implementation, field efficacy, and planned next steps, as well as reviewing observed outcomes. A Better Mousetrap is still in planning and prototyping, and I project future directions for it based on lessons learned from the other two pieces.
3 Gratitude
The media emerged, and then it receded, but with the understanding, guidance, and intellectual flotation devices provided by a wonderful group of faculty, we weren't pulled into the undertoe.
For the last two years I've felt sincerely lucky to have been able to learn an enormous amount from Professors Daragh Byrne, Golan Levin, Eddy Man Kim, and Garth Zeglin, all of whom topped it off by joining my committee, meeting with me many times over, and generously giving me more of themselves than a student has a right to expect. My sincere thanks as well to Lisa Brahms, who generously agreed to join my committee as an external member despite being extremely busy and living out of state.
I would have learned a lot but felt very little without the companionship and camaraderie of the Codelab crew. It has been a remarkably rich and rewarding two years and I'm not ready to say goodbye…so instead I'm thinking I'll probably just keep hanging out. Come find me if the laser's acting up and I bet we can figure it out together.
The weekly homilies and generosity of Hearty White have left unmistakeable fingerprints on this work; my thanks to him for continuing to share his special brand of tikkun olam.
To my funny dad, favorite motherdear, and youngest brother: love you too.
4 Background
This background chapter consists of three sections:
1. A theory and literature review section that situates the core ideas of the present work relative to previously published ideas in social theory and empirical sociological research. A model of the practical value of the current work is proposed.
2. A discussion of some foundational ideas about museum interaction design based on a literature review.
3. A critical review of related prior art, grouped under four headings of loosely defined types: museum exhibits encouraging social interaction, pieces in public spaces encouraging social interaction, public pieces intended explicitly for social-good purposes, and long-distance relationship building. The pieces are presented and briefly discussed. Social theory
The underlying claim of this thesis depends on social connection having value in that it helps to strengthen modern civil society. But what is the value in maintaining or improving the state of civil society? Ultimately there’s something axiomatic about the belief that it is good for people to share positive interactions with each other. It is a leap that we will make.
So: beginning from the belief that there is value in bringing people together positively, how might a designer of tangible interactions in the public sphere go about achieving that end? Thankfully there is a body of empirical research alongside well- developed theory to provide guidance on this question.
People are happier when they’re connected, though they don’t know it
Social rules generally prohibit unnecessary meaningful interactions with strangers
Why do many people have a revulsion to speaking with strangers? There is a complicated history at play and it's not a question that's easily answered. However, some foundational social science writing by Goffman1 addresses the question nicely, and even though the work is now more than fifty years old it still feels in many ways like it describes contemporary norms. In the eighth chapter of this now-canonical work, "Engagements among the Unacquainted," Goffman mentions some categories of people who are generally allowed to be engaged by strangers without any need for social justification. These include police officers, priests wearing their vestments, and also
1 Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places. The Free Press of Glencoe: New York, New York. 1963.
5 the very old and the young. The general rule is that unless a stranger fits into a special category like these select few, one may not initiate meaningful communication with them.
But in addition to the members of these special categories, Goffman points out that otherwise regular people who are temporarily "out of role" can be engaged by strangers; examples of this sort of person are drunk people or people dressed in clown costumes. Why? “Presumably on the the assumption that the self projected through these activities is one from which the individual can easily dissociate himself, and hence need not be jealous of or careful with."2 Goffman’s read is that alternative selves can be commented on socially, engaged with safely, etc., because any commentary on this alternative does no injury to the “real” core of the person in question. The emotional protection of the ego, of the inner self, emerges as the primary rule in all social interaction.
Absent the special circumstances like those described above, Goffman has a label for the generalized purposeful mutual avoidance between strangers: "civil inattention"3. By quickly acknowledging each others' presence, often by making and then immediately breaking eye contact, strangers in public spaces in places like Pittsburgh confirm they see the other person and do not intend to threaten or engage with them. Some people may engage with a token “hi, how are you?” communication, called phatic communication by linguists.4 (This sort of exchange is generally understood to merely be an extension of the same sentiment as can also be communicated by fleeting eye contact.) Whether in gestures or words, once the simple message of acknowledgement and nonthreatening is communicated, there's not likely to be need for further contact between two self-sufficient adults and they grant each other ongoing civil inattention.
Bigger cities produce less friendly connections between strangers
Goffman coins a lovely term to describe one difference between small-town and big-city expectations of comportment:
“In Anglo-American society there exists a kind of ‘nod line’ that can be drawn at a particular point through a rank order of communities according to size. Any community below the line, and hence below a certain size, will subject its adults, whether acquainted or not, to mutual greetings; any community above the line will free all pairs of unacquainted persons from this obligation.” (Goffman p. 132–3.)
This is a quaint formulation of an idea that is supported by folk wisdom: people in small towns are friendlier. Decades after Goffman's book, a wide-ranging sociological 2 Goffman, Behavior. p. 126. 3 Goffman, Erving. Relations in Public. Penguin, 1972. p. 385. As cited in Wikipedia article "Civil inattention," accessed May 13, 2017. available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_inattention 4 See Stark, Kio. When Strangers Meet. Simon & Schuster, Inc.: New York. 2016. p. 18 for further discussion.
6 investigation by Robert Levine et al.5 of kindness and courtesy in 24 small, mid-size, and large American cities experimentally substantiated this message.
The researchers did a few tests where they artificially generated situations calculated to encourage strangers to help a person in need. They refer to them as "helping measures," and in increasing order of urgency, they were:
1. "Change for a Quarter": a researcher holding a quarter in their hand asks if an oncoming walking person can give them change for it.
2. "Dropped pen": a researcher walking down the street drops a pen out of their pocket before crossing paths with the test subject to find whether they will say or do anything to help.
3. "Hurt leg": “walking with a heavy limp and wearing a large and clearly visible leg brace,” the researcher drops a big pile of magazines on the ground and reaches for them but can’t pick them up to find if anybody will help.6
The findings were fairly damning for large cities (which in this case means a population greater than 4 million). Of the 24 cities studied, 8 of them were large, and in the ranked list of helpingness, large cities scored 5th (nicely done, Dallas), 17th, 18th, 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 24th. New York City was dead last and in America's largest metropolis, 13% of people helped a visibly disabled person who had dropped some magazines.7 The statistical result was clear: "Population size and density showed significant negative correlations [in] all of the measures of helping.”8
As increased urbanization happens globally, it stands to reason that the "big city problems" identified by Levine are likely to only become more widespread; in Goffman's terms, there will be fewer people in general living below the "nod line." One could argue that this may be simply a function of people behaving according to their preferences: if they do not gain satisfaction from the act of greeting each other, then they're simply doing what they want. It turns out, however, that this notion—and in fact people's own self-perception—have been disproven empirically.
Strangers like interacting—they just don't know it
An interesting recent study by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder of the University of Chicago used empirical research on subjects traveling on public transit in Chicago to investigate the extent to which people enjoy social interaction.9 Many people are understandably afraid of social interaction with strangers—just on social
5 Levine, Robert V., Stephen Reysen, and Ellen Ganz. "The kindness of strangers revisited: a comparison of 24 US cities". Social Indicators Research. vol. 85. 2008. pp. 461–481. 6 Levine et al. p. 467–8. 7 Levine et al., table 2, p. 471. 8 Levine et al., p. 474. 9 Epley, Nicholas and Juliana Schroeder. “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2014). vol. 143, no. 5. pp. 1980–1999.
7 grounds, it is inherently risky to talk to somebody who is not an acquaintance in a public space. The stranger may take offense to the friendly overture, or even worse, lash out. And so it’s understandable that this study found that most respondents said speaking with a stranger would worsen their daily commute on a train or bus.
The subjects in the study were given the opportunity to put that prediction to the test: a group of study members were asked to start a conversation with somebody on the train or bus they were riding, whereas another group was asked to keep to themselves. (A third control group was given no special instructions regarding social interaction.) If social interaction with strangers is risky and off-putting, as participants tended to assert prior to the study, then one would expect those tasked with engaging socially to have bad experiences.
In fact, the opposite was true. In statistically robust findings, the authors explained that “people liked their conversation partners, had pleasant conversations, and had more positive commutes the longer their conversations lasted.”10 It’s an impressive repudiation of the notions most people have about strangers, and it suggests that perhaps getting people to engage may be functionally introducing a minor discomfort in the service of a larger payoff.
Further confirmation of this same finding came from a study by Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia.11 The researchers asked study subjects to engage in a small-talk conversation with their coffeeshop barista (and asked control subjects not to speak unnecessarily with the barista). The authors aimed to compare the "inefficiency" that some may think would arise from small talk with the social benefits to those engaged in that small talk.
Just as in the Epley and Schroeder study, findings were that people reported greater “positive affect” and lesser “negative affect” after they had a small engagement with their barista versus when they were more “efficient” in that they just grabbed their coffee and ran.12 It's worth noting that the coffeeshop in question was a busy one, at an urban location on a weekday afternoon, which is the type of environment in which a customer may think that transactional efficiency is more important than chatting in the moment. The authors suggest that it's an advantageous habit to intentionally turn a stranger into a "weak tie" (see discussion of Granovetter's term, below) for the purpose of creating greater all-around positive affect among both interactants.
To summarize the findings: most people misjudge their own interest in having even lightweight social interactions with strangers—and given a little push in the direction towards engagement, they find the experience to be surprisingly pleasant. 10 Epley and Schroeder, p. 1984. 11 Sandstrom, Gillian and Elizabeth Dunn. “Is Efficiency Overrated?: Minimal Social Interactions Lead to Belonging and Positive Affect”. Social Psychology and Personality Science. vol. 5, no. 4. 2014. pp. 437–442. doi: 10.1177/1948550613502990 12 Sandstrom and Dunn, p. 439.
8 Other that simply asking people if they enjoyed their conversation, though, there is even deeper physiological evidence that is concordant with these findings.
People exhibit live physiological mirror responses to strangers with whom they have even a weak connection
There is a wide berth between a complete stranger and one with whom somebody has some sense of camaraderie, however distant. This has been studied in a variety of ways—perhaps most famously as described by Mark Granovetter's landmark paper, "The Strength of Weak Ties."13 Granovetter explores theoretically how a multiplicity of loose ("weak") connections between people, as opposed to the "strong" ties such as those between close friends or family, can actually be equally or more important to defining the strength of an individual's overall social network.
Consider the case of two people who have a car accident on the highway. Initially speaking angrily to each other, they discover that they hail from the same town. This simple connection, meaningless as it may be given the circumstance, may significantly diffuse tensions between the drivers; they are no longer complete strangers since they've located a meaningful, albeit weak, tie. There are deep anthropological roots of this sort of behavior, for instance as Jared Diamond describes the practice among speakers of Central !Kung in northeast Namibia: two adult male strangers from different villages meeting unexpectedly in the wilderness immediately begin to discuss the possible ways they may be related to each other, and after extensive review of their family trees they can't find any mutual ties, one of the two is likely to try to drive off or kill the other as a trespasser.14
An interesting study by David Cwir et al. explores the power of this sort of seemingly unimportant connection between people who are otherwise total strangers in a more institutionalized context.15 The study divided subjects into two groups. Subjects in the experimental group were introduced to a stranger (actually a research confederate) and, based on a small opinion survey the subject had filled out about a week prior, the subject would discover to her surprise that the confederate shared three out of her five opinions. Subjects in the control group matched zero out of five opinions.
Then the confederate was made to run in place for three minutes as the subject sat nearby in a chair. At the end of the stranger's exercise session, researchers measured the blood pressure and heart rate of the subjects and found that the greater sense of social connection between subject and confederate correlated with a
13 Granovetter, Mark. “The Strength of Weak Ties”. American Journal of Sociology. vol. 78, no. 6. May, 1973. pp. 1360–80. 14 Diamond, Jared. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? New York: Viking, 2012. pp. 50–51. 15 Cwir, David, Priyanka B. Carr, Gregory M. Walton, and Steven J. Spencer. "Your heart makes my heart move: Cues of social connectedness cause shared emotions and physiological states among strangers". J Experimental Social Psychology. vol 47. 2011. pp. 661–4. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.01.009
9 physiological connection as well: socially-connected subjects' heart rates went up by an average of 5 bpm while socially-unconnected subjects' heart rates went up only 0.5 bpm.
We have seen, then, that remarkably even people's autonomic bodily functions show the significance of weak connections with each other, in a process that is below the threshold of the subject's consciousness. Next, we review evidence of how people respond to people whom they think of as "outsiders."
People distrust or dislike people from outside groups
Just as test subjects demonstrated a shared physiological response to people with whom they shared some opinions, a study by Leslie Zebrowitz et al.16 examined people's responses to images of faces of strangers from different racial groups. In short, perhaps unsurprisingly the research found that people had more negative responses to images of members of different racial groups than their own. The authors propose the "familar face overgeneralization hypothesis," which asserts an evolutionary basis in humans' preference for members of their own familiar group. The reasoning is that historically, humans were right to be wary of outsiders who may pose a threat to their community; outsiders can be defined as such in part because they look different than the ingroup members.
This would appear to be a difficult to surmount obstacle to efforts to create social cohesion, if indeed there are literally biological factors that are encouraging people to distrust or dislike members of other racial groups. However, the Zebrowitz et al. study did not merely examine people's aversion to outsiders: it also found a surprisingly simple mechanism of reducing that aversion.
How might one go about making a visually distinct outsider more appealing? According to the findings, it can be achieved by showing images of members of that person's racial group to a subject. Simply seeing a variety of images of East Asian or Black people significantly increased the odds that a white test subject would respond more positively to an image of another person of that race. This is referred to in the psychological literature as the "mere exposure" effect—namely, that simply being exposed to a stimulus like a person's face (i.e. merely being exposed) can increase one's positive feelings towards that stimulus. The familiar, in other words, is preferred over the unknown.
This seems like a fairly obvious conclusion and not especially noteworthy, but an interesting wrinkle about the mode of exposure people had to outgroup faces illustrates the depth at which this type of judgment is taking place. The researchers exposed white subjects to images of East Asian and Black faces supraliminally,
16 Zebrowitz, Leslie, Benjamin White, and Kristin Weineke. "Mere Exposure and Racial Prejudice: Exposure to Other-Race Faces Increases Liking for Strangers of that Race". Social Cognition. vol. 26, no. 3. 2008. pp. 259–275. doi: 10.1521/soco.2008.26.3.259
10 meaning that the subjects were able to see and be aware of seeing the faces. In these cases, the authors found that people responded as described above. However, the researchers also exposed different subjects subliminally to images of East Asian and Black faces, meaning that the exposure times to the images were so brief that they did not consciously register that they'd seen those faces. Even in the subliminal cases, they found tound that the subjects' attitudes changed in the same way, despite the subjects not being conscious of the exposure they'd been subjected to.
The practical implications of this research are significant: it demonstrates that mere exposure, even if conducted fleetingly, can be a meaningful way to increase positive associations across racial divides.
Various measures of social connection show declines on small and large scales
Casual civic engagement has been declining in America for decades
Robert Putnam's 1995 article "Bowling Alone" launched a wave of research aimed at understanding decades of informal civic disengagement in the US.17 Putnam's claim was that in many ways, casual ties between members of civic society had been eroding since the postwar heyday of the fifties.
He cites a variety of declining trends indicating the same pattern: turnout at elections, public affairs meetings, houses of worship, the Lions, the Elks, and the Masons. Union membership has declined, as has the number of people volunteering for Boy Scouts and the Red Cross.18 The title of the article is drawn from a shift in the way people recreationally bowl: whereas there were for a time a great many thriving bowling leagues, bringing together friends and neighbors in regular friendly competition, Putman cites statistics showing that while there are more people bowling in America today than in the past, they are now bowling alone instead of in leagues.
Putnam suggested some explanantions for these social trends, and writing in 1995, suggested that one of the contributing factors was the "technical transformation of leisure," which he observed tended to give people the opportunity to engage in solo leisure activities like television.19 Of course the extent to which this was true twenty years ago has been dwarfed by the current state of affairs, where it's no longer remarkable to see a public space full of people literally all of whom are preoccupied with media or games on their own mobile phones. Barring some unexpected large-scale social change of course, surely this trend towards increasingly individualized and enveloping media engagement will continue.
The urban–rural divide in particular is increasing 17 Putnam, Robert D. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”. Journal of Democracy. vol. 6., no. 1. January 1995. pp. 65-78. doi: 10.1353/jod.1995.0002 18 Putnam p. 69–10. 19 Putnam p. 75.
11 In social science it is frequently difficult to come by reliable numerical data that captures people's thoughts and feelings. Many surveys extrapolate from a relatively small sample group to make claims about larger populations, but the cost of doing larger surveys is quite significant. Fortunately, we have a survey mechanism in place in which millions of American adults voluntarily participate on a regular basis: elections.
There were 137 million participants20 in the U.S. 2016 general election, representing adult Americans from every walk of life. Geographical analysis of the election returns is based on an extremely wide-ranging dataset, and sheds light on the political disposition of every part of the country. While using political data to make claims about social division is an inherently risky maneuver, there are some obvious alignments between many people's political and social preferences, a fact which national campaigns take careful advantage of.
The elections metric that is perhaps most revealing about the state of social division across the rural/urban divide is a simple one: using counties as a grouping mechanism, it's easy to examine each local area's returns and measure the difference in votes that the 1st and 2nd place candidates had in that area. Any county with a greater than 20% disparity between first and second place (i.e. any county that's 60/40 or more split) can be called a "landslide" county, in Bill Bishop's language.21 In a de-facto two-party country in which both parties vie aggressively for the median voter, the finding that 60% of all voters now live in "landslide" counties illustrates the emerging divisions quite clearly. In fact, according to Bishop's analysis, in 2016 80% of voters who lived in "rural and remote" areas lived in landslide counties. This represents a huge increase; twelve years prior in 2004 the equivalent metric was 59%.22 Conversely, some of the country's most-landslide counties are in cities; Washington, D.C., for instance, divided 90/4.23
The 2016 election made clear that there are some cultural and political forces which prefer for their own purposes to foster an urban/rural social and cultural divide. Building installations for social purposes Best practices for creating social connections
A variety of techniques have been explored for the purpose of creating positive social connections between strangers. Some of these are mentioned above in the context of Epley and Schroeder's research (connecting commuters on public transit) and Sandstrom and Dunn's research (encouraging people to chat with their barista), among others. Both these lines of study found efficacy in connecting 20 Wikipedia article "United States presidential election, 2016". accessed 12/12/2016. available https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016 21 Bishop, Bill. "Caught in a Landslide". article in "The Daily Yonder". accessed 12/1/16. available at http://www. dailyyonder.com/caught-in-a-landslide-county-level-voting-shows-increased-sorting/2016/11/21/16361 22 Bishop, top graphic: http://www.dailyyonder.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/cart1-3.jpg 23 District of Columbia Board of Elections General Election 2016—Certified Results. accessed 12/12/16. available: https://www.dcboee.org/election_info/election_results/v3/2016/November-8-General-Election
12 strangers and producing a greater sense of positive affect among the experimental subjects. However, the experiments these represent were contrivances with informed participants—in this way they're not representative of the sort of social intervention between strangers at the heart of the present research.
So while there are certainly lessons to be learned from the studies mentioned above, further research conducted between uninformed participants is especially relevant.
Creating interpersonal closeness
Given two unacquainted people, how might they be brought to have some measure of interpersonal closeness? While the outcome is notoriously difficult to measure, research has shed light on some good answers. A study conducted by Arthur Aron et al.24 aimed to test a proposed procedure for achieving "closeness" between study subjects, where closeness had the wonderful definition of "'including the other in the self'—creating an interconnectedness of self and other."25
The general procedure the researchers were testing for generating closeness was "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure."26 This seems like a failsafe recipe for generating closeness, as the basis of meaningful relationships is mutual trust and disclosure. It is, however, not necessarily easy to force people into the emotional crucible of sharing their innermost thoughts, and one imagines that some of the study subjects were made uncomfortable at times discussing deeply personal matters with people they'd just met, e.g. "when did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?" and "of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?"27 Quickly building rapport through mutual self-disclosure like this may be the most effective way of quickly generating "closeness," but it is plainly far too top-down and emotionally burdensome to impose on strangers in a public space who are not explicitly electing to participate in research.
Though of course the original interaction projects of this thesis do not directly use this heavy-handed interview-style method of generating closeneness, selected research findings are still relevant. For instance, researchers constructed two different classes of pairs: those whom the researchers matched for likely agreement, and those matched for likely disagreement. Following their structured talk, even people in the likely-to-disagree pairs still had achieved a high level of closeness with their partner. Extrapolating from this finding: following a certain process of closeness generation, even demonstrably quite different people can come to feel closeness—in fact, just as
24 Aron, Arthur, Edward Melinat, Elaine N. Aron, Robert Darrin Vallone, and Renee J. Bator. “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. April 1997. Vol. 23, no. 4. p. 363–377. doi: 10.1177/0146167297234003 25 Aron et al., p. 364. The first part of this definition is attributed to two prior papers by a subset of the same authors. 26 Aron et al., p. 364 27 Aron et al., pp. 374 and 375, respectively
13 much closeness as demonstrably similar people.
Interactive objects in the public space
This thesis research has the intention of producing several interactive pieces in public space, and there is prior social science work specific to this goal. In addition to basic research in social psychology, there is a rich stream of work coming from the interactive museum field that pertains to the present thesis.
Case study in the literature
A recent study by Mara Balestrini et al.28 covers nearly exactly the same subject area as this thesis research: the "Jokebox" is an installation at a bus stop in an urban setting in Mexico which aimed to create social interactions among strangers. The researchers devised a setup designed to foster interactions by guiding users through a simple pathway of engagement. Two large red buttons with internal lights were set up on small podiums about three meters apart. If either of the podiums detects somebody nearby its speaker announces "if you want to hear a joke, press both buttons at the same time," and the buttons start blinking indicating that the system is in play mode. The spacing of the podiums and timing of the buttons means that two people need to cooperate to complete the button-pushing task.
Once triggered by the two pushes in rapid succession, the system rewards users by telling them a lighthearted joke through a loudspeaker. (The jokes were randomly selected from a list of jokes that had been judged through a survey to be popular among locals.) The Jokebox was very effective at creating excitement and enthusiasm among users, even producing very interesting ancillary social structures around the system that developed spontaneously. For instance, the researchers report three users they describe as "champions" of the Jokebox, insofar as they would recruit others to try the system out, explaining as necessary, and evangelizing about its fun and value. An additional effect they observed is the so-called "honeypot," where once a pair of people has engaged with the system and appear to be having fun, others are attracted to come and try it for themselves, frequently forming a chain of successive interactions after the first one has begun.29
The Jokebox uses audio as the medium of engagement, and that is a very intentional decision on the part of the researchers. They reason that many contemporary interactive installations in public space are based on large display screens, which means that the participants are likely to chiefly direct their gaze at the screen(s). Using a "screenless" sound-based system means that users of the Jokebox are free to make eye contact with each other while they are listening to the joke—a consideration that seems minor but in fact may really affect the extent to 28 Balestrini, Mara, Paul Marshall, Raymundo Cornejo, Monica Tentori, Jon Bird, and Yvonne Rogers. “Jokebox: Coordinating Shared Encounters in Public Spaces”. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Coopertive Work & Social Computing (2016). p. 38–49. doi: 10.1145/2818048.2835203 29 Balestrini et al., p. 39
14 which participants meaningfully connect with each other. Eye contact between humans (and some other mammals, for that matter) is known to be a significant pathway for emotional communication and connection, and installations that encourage or facilitate it have an additional emotional affordance.
A telling observation about the system design:
Moreover, the device was designed to make it clear what users should do with it, but why they should use it, who had created it, and why it was installed in a particular context was ambiguous and left to their own interpretation. (p. 40)
Ambiguity around purpose but clarity around use is a very rich combination in that it affords the participants a lot of creative decisionmaking power. It is a sibling of the distinction between laying out pieces of a construction kit with versus without instructions: the kit with instructions implies a singular, correct way of engaging with the materials, whereas the kit without is an open invitation to discovery and creative engagement.
General design considerations
Of course, is difficult to generalize broadly about the design decisions that can contribute to the efficacy of an installation; the questions are usually particular to each piece. That said, there are some guiding considerations that are good to keep in mind when designing an installation. These main points are drawn from the excellent guidance provided by Thomas Humphrey and Joshua Gutwill's Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement30 and Nina Simon's The Participatory Museum31, as well as my own experience.
• Draw the user(s) in. The piece should be interesting aesthetically, mechanically, or otherwise. It should be inherently intriguing by design, and not because nearby signage says that it is intriguing. If all of the engagement will happen through knobs, then the knobs should be obvious and enticing. The users' curiosity or sense of beauty (or both) should be excited, and then the piece should give them an obvious way of channeling that excitement into an exploration by manipulating the knob. If the piece is designed to require more than one user at a time, then it should be fairly obvious that this is the case, and the second (or third…) user should see how they can begin engaging alongside the first. The additional user should see that by participating, they will be giving the other user a chance to have a richer or more fun engagement, while also having the same chance for himself or herself.
• Provide a breadth of modes of engagement. The best user experiences are 30 Humphrey, Thomas and Joshua P. Gutwill. Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement; the Art of Creating APE Exhibits. Exploratorium: San Francisco. 2005. 31 Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Museum 2.0: Santa Cruz. 2010. See especially chapter 4 "Social Objects" for exhibit design ideas
15 those where they feel empowered to be the masters of their own fate. The user makes decisions, within the universe that the installation provides for, and is able to succeed or fail on their own terms based on their decisions. From Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement: "Initial engagement does not require a single starting place; rather, it requires that any starting place proide a reliable entry to the exhibit experience."32 Just because a particular type of interaction isn't the one the designer is looking to spark does not mean they should necessarily intentionally preclude it from possibility. Users will often surprise designers with the clever and unexpected ways of engaging with pieces; better for a designer to be pleased with the user's creativity rather than being frustrated that they missed the point.
• Establish boundaries and challenges but don't overinstruct. At a light table which allows users to manipulate lenses and mirrors, use a light source which is not harmful to eyes so that users can safely choose to use a mirror to shine the light outside of the plane of the table. In an installation that involves making a drawing, give the user the ability to color in every single corner of the drawable surface if they so choose— this sort of engagement, which the designer probably did not have in mind, might be exactly the sort of expression that the user finds most rewarding and empowering (especially, for instance, if they're very detail-oriented). Boundaries of some sort, of course, crucially help guide creative thinking and provide meaningful points of entry to most users for whom unimpeded creativity is hard to express. Giving a user a lump of clay and instructing them to "make anything" is a much harder assignment for most than giving them the clay and challenging them to use it to represent the veins of a leaf, or a counting system.
• Reward creativity and provide opportunities for sharing. While the joy of creative expressive output is rewarding on its own for many users, this is not universally the case. If the installation is electronic, one pathway for rewarding creativity is to allow users to directly "share" their creations through a web-based platform like Twitter, or by adding a comment to a dedicated museum blog page, etc. In analog systems, or ones where the creative output does not lend itself to being shared online, giving a user the chance to have their work displayed on some literally larger platform (such as a projector wall image of the last 25 users' creations) can work very well. The hope is always that the user's intrinsic excitement and pride of creativity will be their prime emotional mover, but of course it's best to accommodate as many different- minded types of users as possible.
Measuring efficacy
In the museum literature there are several ways of measuring user engagement with exhibits. Generally speaking, the crudest and simplest measurement is called "holding time," which refers simply to the length of time that a user stays engaged with one particular piece.33 While obviously a singular measurement, holding time can tell a 32 Humphrey and Gutwill, Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement, p. 130 33 See, for instance, Humphrey and Gutwill, Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement, p. 9
16 meaningful story about a piece; it is probably most useful in comparison rather than just on its own. If holding time is measured before and after a change has been made to the interface or interaction system, for instance, then measuring median holding time across a range of users will help elucidate any effect the change has had.
As an example of using this statistic as a benchmark, the Exploratorium was interested in understanding differences between what they call "planned discovery" exhibits (which are more closed-ended) and "active prolonged engagement" exhibits (which are more open-ended). They classed different exhibits into these categories and then compared the average holding times for each, and found a very big difference: 1.1 minutes for planned discovery versus 3.3 minutes for active prolonged engagement.34
Other simple statistics can obviously help tell the story of the installation quite straightforwardly: how many people pass by versus stop to interact? In the case of a piece where the primary purpose is to encourage interactions amongst strangers, how many times did strangers in fact interact with each other? Do people in groups interact more with the piece or do more people on their own use it?
While there are plenty of reasonable statistical measures for engagement, the deeper story is likely to be found in subjective reasearch and analysis. For instance, in the case of a particular installation, researchers may code extended video of the piece in order to understand what sorts of conversations users are having around it. In the case of a drawing machine, researchers may note the types and forms of drawings that users are making, in addition to how long they spent drawing them. Note that the general practice in the United States is to only record visitors at this level of specificity with their informed consent, typically inside a setting that is specifically set aside as a study area.35
With a variety of subjective and objective measures available to measure exhibit efficacy, the unfortunately irreducible summary for the researcher is that the "best" way to productively measure a particular installation will be heavily dependent on particulars of that exhibit; what the researchers are precisely looking to understand; the time, staff, and resources and equipment available to the researchers; as well as decisions about privacy concerns as they pertain to measurement.
General fabrication considerations
The practice of making interactive engaging installations for use by the public draws on many disciplines. Above, there has been discussion of thematic and philosophical considerations, but of course there are much more mundane concerns that come to pass when actually producing a physical object for installation. Variations in material selection, fabrication methods, selecting electronic versus mechanical
34 Humphrey and Gutwill, Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement, p. 13 35 Discussion in this paragraph drawn largely from Humphrey and Gutwill, Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement, pp. 9–16.
17 controls, and even proper attention to internal ventilation can ultimately make an installation successful or unsuccessful in the long term—because if it repeatedly breaks after being used normally for a couple of days, at that point it doesn't matter how much careful thought went into the conceptual execution or careful user interface design.
It's quite difficult, however, to make an a priori concise claim about the "right" way of doing these things—the decisions to be made are all heavily contextually dependent on the particulars of what type of piece is being constructed, for installation where and for how long, on what budget, for use by what audience, etc. Building for user-friendliness and longevity is very important, of course, but there are many more subtle design considerations which can have significant downstream effects on the reception and efficacy of the final product, and these are frequently relatively unpredictable.
The museum setting is one that has been well-described in the literature, and in particular no institution probably has a deeper record of creative public-facing interactive installations than the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Their guidance on questions of fabrication is worth paying careful attention to, and thankfully the spirit of it is summarized quite succinctly in the introduction to the first Exploratorium Cookbook36, a manual for exhibit builders:
“The exhibits look unfinished because they are unfinished, Exploratorium exhibit builders will tell you. [Exploratorium founder] Frank Oppenheimer believed that no exhibit could ever be considered complete: if a change would improve an exhibit, the change should be made. This attitude has shaped the process of exhibit development at the Exploratorium. The development of an Exploraotirum exhibit is an evolutionary process, involving prolonged experimentation and tinkering. In a sense, all the exhibits and the Exploratorium—even the ones that have been on display for years—are prototypes, still subject to change.” (p. vi)
The Cookbook also explains that all new exhibits sit immediately outside the exhibit shop (which is part of the main museum floor) for at least a month, so that exhibit makers can observe visitors' interactions and make improvements before moving the piece out to its permanent place on the floor.37 The simplest and most essential lesson here is that the proper way to make good, user-friendly, effective, long-lasting pieces for installation in public space is to take very seriously the process of testing, iterating, and improving the piece based on observations of user interactions. There is no checklist of best practices to follow or bill of robust materials to build with that will be more informative than simply doing the fundamental work of iterative design improvements. 36 Bruman, Raymond. Exploratorium Cookbook I; a Construction Manual for Exploratorium Exhibits. revised edition. The Exploratorium: San Francisco. 1991. 37 Bruman, Exploratorium Cookbook I, p. vii
18 Selected prior art
Following is a selection of twenty installations, exhibits, and art pieces representing prior art relevant to this thesis for different reasons. The pieces are loosely categorized under four headings: "exhibits in museums that encourage social interaction," "interactive pieces in public spaces that encourage social interaction," "pieces in public spaces intended explicitly for social-good purposes," and finally "long- distance relationship building."
Of course the category headings don't always effectively encompass the scope of the pieces they contain, but for the purpose of this review the headings are intended to help differentiate between what may otherwise appear to be a motley field. Sometimes successful pieces are only successful in their particular niche—perhaps they are reliant on the context of the room they're situated in, or the block of the city they were built for. Other pieces have a universality, intentional or otherwise, which means they might be just as effective in fostering user engagement in a subway station as they would in a modern art museum, and so the location in which they were presented (and which category they are listed under here) may be incidental.
In each category, works are ordered by their installation date.
19 Exhibits in museums that encourage social cooperate, can alter the pattern in which the interaction pendulum swings (circle, ellipse, line, etc.)." Exploratorium Cookbook II, p. 85.39
The subtlety of this piece is hard to overstate; quite poetically, each individual interaction by a visitor only moves the heavy mass a very small amount, but the summation of a long sequence of interactions makes for a greater and greater output.
Resonant Pendulum at the Exploratorium38, ca. 1986. This is a wonderful example of a simple, carefully-designed interactive exhibit which simultaneously illustrates scientific content through an interactive experience, while subtly rewarding cooperative behavior between multiple users. The Exploratorium's own Cookbook explains it succinctly:
"The visitor swings a small magnet onto a steel collar attached to a heavy pendulum hung from the ceiling. Because of the weak magnet, the visitor learns that only by pulling in time with the swing of the pendulum (in resonance), can the pendulum be moved. Two magnets are tied to the fence at 90
degrees to each other so the users, if they 39 Hipschman, Ron. Exploratorium Cookbook II; a Construction Manual for 38 Exploratorium, Pier 15, San Francisco, CA 94111. exploratorium.org Exploratorium Exhibits. revised edition. The Exploratorium: San Francisco. 1986.
20
Analog Interactive Installation by Karina Smigla-Bobinski40 in São Paulo, 2010. This is an interactive art installation that is beautiful in its simplicity: a large clear inflated plastic ball, 41 neutrally buoyant or slightly less dense than air, is studded Reach by Scott Garner at the Children's Museum of 42 with sticks of heavy black charcoal. (The appearance is Pittsburgh , 2013. This piece is approximately 10 feet reminiscent of a naval mine, though it's not clear if that is wide, and its user-visible components are a variety of the artist's intent or a mere coincidence.) The ball resides symbols of the night sky cut out of heavy sheet metal, in a white gallery space. As visitors push the ball around, it affixed to a dark blue background. There is a central moon draws many black marks on the floor, walls, and ceiling, and and stars out at radial extensions from it. If a user makes after a time the gallery becomes a sort of map of all of the elecrical contact between the moon and any star, the piece possible places the ball can touch (leaving the edges of the plays a gentle musical tone. Since some stars are farther room white, since the radius of the sphere doens't permit than an arm's breadth away from the center moon, only it to reach into corners). The simple expressiveness and joy cooperation between users holding hands affords the of the interactions are obvious, as well as the transgression possibility of playing all of the star tones. of both pushing a big floating ball around in a gallery space, which is operating outside of typical gallery decorum—and of course the fact that all that pushing empowers the 41 further information at the artist's website: http://www.scottmadethis. visitor to make their own thick, black marks on the gallery net/interactive/reach/ and thereby join in the creative process. 42 Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, 10 Children's Way, Allegheny Square, Pittsburgh, PA 15212. pittsburghkids.org
40 artist's website: http://www.smigla-bobinski.com/english/works/ADA/
21 tangible aspect, consisting of long foam "logs" that could be arranged on the floor to steer the flow of a virtual river. It is instructive to note that Theo Watson, one of the Design I/O artists who made the piece, said that he observed the logs were often a major focus of interaction for many children using the piece45. It illustrates that while the digital universe of Connected Worlds is exceedingly rich, still there is something persistently appealing about the joy of physical manipulation.
Connected Worlds by Design I/O43 at the New York Hall of Science44, 2015. This piece is a very technically sophisticated installation that involves an entire self- contained virtual ecosystem which visitors can affect through their actions (which are interpreted by gesture- reading cameras). There are no rules per se, and visitors learn what sorts of effects they can have through open- ended experimentation. They find that they can water plants to make them thrive, or overwater them to kill them. They can also nurture and interact with freeform creatures that evolve visibly, produce offspring, and die/disappear. The piece is quite poetic in that in lieu of imposing a set of rules on its users, it invites engagment through exploration and experimentation. The piece also included a single
43 artists' website: http://design-io.com/projects/ConnectedWorlds/ 44 New York Hall of Science, 47-01 111th St., Corona, NY, 11368. nysci. org 45 From my own conversation with Mr. Watson in December 2016.
22
48 To Conjugate by Anne Lily at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh49, 2016. Two large-diameter antique metal Bubble Device #5 by Nicolas Hanna46 at the Children's wheels are supported on minimalist stands on the ground; Museum of Pittsburgh47, 2016. A fairly sophisticated an axle runs from each to a metal gearbox with two machine that automatically and without user intervention antique carriage seats on top of it, facing back to back. If blows very large bubbles at a regular interval towards the more weight is placed on one seat than the other (by a visitor area. It forms bubbles by dipping long weighted visitor sitting on one seat as the other is empty, for strings into a till of soapy water, lifting them out, and instance), then the imbalance between them generates a spreading them apart with a fan blowing air through the force that applies a torque to the two large wheels via the gap. Users tend to invent their own interactions; I axles. The wheels hold a good deal of rotational momentum witnessed a group challenging each other to blow bubbles- and will continue spinning once they're accelerated, and will in-bubbles through carefully aimed puffs of air. Of course, drive the two seats up and down seesawing continuously. people love to try to catch or pop the bubbles, and some Two visitors can discover the mechanism of the device, lay on the ground to watch them floating overhead. The which is not immediately obvious, through playful interactions are driven by the visitors who keep getting experimentation and sitting on the seats. Then, in order to these evanescent forms blown out towards them—a new accelerate the wheels up to a reasonable speed, they will chance to experiment about twice a minute. need to see-saw against each other, and in this way their cooperative effort is rewarded with a richer outcome. 46 artist's website currently has information about prior iterations of bubble devices: http://www.nicholashanna.net/ 48 artist's website: http://www.annelilly.com/archive.html 47 Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, 10 Children's Way, Allegheny Square, 49 Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, 10 Children's Way, Allegheny Square, Pittsburgh, PA 15212. pittsburghkids.org Pittsburgh, PA 15212. pittsburghkids.org
23 Interactive pieces in public spaces that otherwise large quiet public space. But in addition, since encourage social interaction there are two control levers, one on either platform, passengers whose trains will be going in opposite directions can inspire each other to play chime music. The interaction may be very simple, but very rich in that it bridges a gap that is normally pecularliarly fallow: the rows of passengers on opposing platforms whose natural body position means that they are facing towards each other (from a distance of perhaps 30 feet) but who generally do not interact with each other at all.
Kendall Band by Paul Matisse50 in Cambridge, MA, 1987. One of three installations in Paul Matisse's "Pythagoras" series in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's Kendall/MIT subway station. This inventive and interactive piece consists of a series of vertically hung tubular gongs which are positioned in between tracks of opposing train traffic. There are hammers hanging in between the gongs and in their same plane, and these can be played by a person on the passenger platform operating a large metal handle back and forth, which makes the entire rack of gongs and hammers swing back and forth. The music that's produced is stochastic but beautiful (akin to windchimes). It's audible throughout the station, and so the action of one interested passenger can bring pleasant sounds to an
50 artist's website: www.paulmatisse.com/kendall-band/
24
21 Balançoires (21 Swings) by Daily tous les Jours51 in Montréal, 2011. A sequence of swings installed in a public pedestrian space in Montréal has an invisible aspect of musical play built in; swinging back and forth makes tones that the swinging person and others nearby can hear. But Times Square Valentine by Bjarke Ingles Group52 in a hidden property emerges when multiple swing in unison: Manhattan, 2012. An installation in Times Square in honor special chords and sounds are played which one person by of Valentine's Day consisting of a podium with an image of herself cannot trigger. This subtle, unstated rewarding of a heart on it and the instructions "TOUCH ME," and a large cooperative behavior sends a message to the participants heart-shaped mass of plastic rods which illuminate a heart about the value of working in concert with others and of varying size. The more people who are touching the reinforces a positive social message. "TOUCH ME" podium at once, the larger the heart will glow, thereby encouraging people to hold each others' hands in a chain to increase the size as much as possible. A nice, fairly simple piece that operates on a similar principle as other works cited here: encouraging literal contact between 51 artists' website: http://www.dailytouslesjours.com/project/21- people in order to produce a bigger or better effect. balancoires/ 52 artists' website: http://www.big.dk/#projects-vvv
25 marriage of what would normally be disparate experences of mechanism and cultural media—with the natural pull of engaging with one (who doesn't want to push a button?) leading to the chance to be made into an audience member for the other. An exemplary piece of social engagement that operates simultaneously on multiple levels.
Small Kindnesses, Weather Permitting, by Janet Zweig53 in Minneapolis, 2014. An interesting and multivalent installation series commissioned by the Metropolitan Council for eleven stops of the Hiawatha Light Rail in Minneapolis. The installations each feature some sort of manually-activated interaction, such as pushing a button to ring a bell through a complex mechanical linkage, advance a manual counter, or operate a windshield wiper. As the artist puts it, "Each unit has a mechanical initiator (like a hand crank, a push button, a lever) and a digital output— either audio only or video with audio."54 These media pieces are produced by locals and are changed on a regular basis. The user of the piece, therefore, not only gets to interact with an interestingly constructed mechanical device, but also is rewarded with a local voice that might not otherwise get heard in a broadcast form. It's a lovely 53 artist's website: www.janetzweig.com/public/Small_Kindnesses.html 54 www.janetzweig.com/public/Small_Kindnesses.html
26 Pieces in public spaces intended explicitly for social-good purposes
Table for Two by Shani Ha55 in Manhattan, 2015. A static The Meeting Place by ASPECT Studios56 in Sydney, 2009. A piece, installed half inside and half outside of a coffeeshop commission for the City of Sydney, this clever intervention in Manhattan. A table appears to be divided in half by the consists only of large pieces of semitransparent yellow glass wall of the shop, and is a regular-sized table for two, fabric placed strategically in a fairly narrow walkway in the with one chair on either side. Of course, since there's an city. The curved arrangement of the taut fabric means that exterior glass wall bisecting the table, two people sitting at as one passes through the walkway, the path becomes either end of it can see each other clearly, but cannot narrower and encourages (or requires) some interaction meaningfully communicate verbally. They are in different with an oncoming pedestrian so that both may pass. The and shared spaces at the same moment. The piece plays fabric is also dynamic, in that it's strong enough for people with the sense of isolation-in-proximity that large cities to bounce off of playfully. And people who are outside of especially can engender in the daily experiences of their the narrow corridor formed can see, to some extent, the citizens. It's a subtle and beautiful exploration of what it people passing by: thus the pedestrians in the center means to be seem to be close to somebody without channel become (potentially unwitting) performers in a actually being close at all, and it allows for a rich public space. A fun, clever, simple intervention that experience in a sort of social nether-realm. An interesting encourages a playful sort of interaction where there was provocation challenging ideas of proximity and distance just a normal street before. amongst city dwellers. 55 artist's website: http://shani-ha.com/table-for-two-shani-ha/ 56 artists' website: aspect.net.au/?p=134
27
The Machine To Be Another by BeAnotherLab57 in Barcelona, 2014. A fascinating series of experiments explicitly using high-tech tools (head-mounted displays and head- and body-mounted cameras) to give people the visceral experience of inhabiting another person's body. The basic operation of the system is to use two VR headsets with forward-facing cameras (these cameras are roughly in the same position as a person's perspective normally would be), and transmitting the view from each person's perspective into the headset view of the other. If, Portals Project by Shared_Studios58 in various locations then, the two participants consciously decide to copy each around the world, 2015. A beautiful project that aims to others' body positioning and movement, as well as gaze, very directly decrease the sense of social and cultural then the illusion of inhabiting the other person's body will distance between people living in different parts of the be as complete as is feasible given the technology. The world, by giving them the opportunity to have a project encourages participants to "be" people who are (technologically mediated) natural face-to-face interaction. different from them in important ways—such as having An individual "Portal" is packed in a gold-painted shipping different gender, race, physical ability, or age. The piece is, container and has a very large screen area (approx. 8' x 8' of course, thoroughly technical in its implementation; there or greater) along with sound and video capture; each Portal is nothing quite so obviously techy as having a VR unit presents a life-size image of the person or people standing strapped to one's head, and to have cables coming from at a different Portal. the skull. But the technicality of the execution is totally offset by the apparent power of the experience it affords of inhabiting another's body. 57 artists' website: themachinetobeanother.org/ 58 artists' website: http://www.sharedstudios.com/
28
Jokebox by Mara Balestrini et al.62 in Mexico, 2016 (this Love Has No Labels X-ray installation by Persuade and 59 study discussed in further detail in the background section Content , Los Angeles, 2015. A simple and beautiful above). A social science experiment conducted at a bus evocation of the ways in which people's normative views stop near a university, the authors built a system that of social interactions can be shown to be mistaken. A would reward the cooperative behavior of passers by: two large LED display wall shows two life-sized human 60 podiums a few meters apart each have a big blinking red skeletons (imitating a fluoroscope view) that are kissing button on top. When both of these buttons are pushed at or embracing. The live audience is then surprised to see the same time, the button pushers are rewarded by hearing the bodies have actual people associated with them, who a joke played from a speaker in the box. The intervention lean out of the sides of the screen as the big reveal. Some was generally well-received, with many observed positive of the embracing couples are same-sex, some are mixed interactions generated as reported by the researchers. race, and some are cross-religion, or otherwise non- normative. By virtually reducing people to mere skeletons, devoid of gender or any discernible social markers (except perhaps for height), the piece beautifully illustrates the fundamentally superficial nature of these sorts of qualities. Note that the installation was expressly made to produce a tearjerker video for viral release61, rather than to reach a large audience in person. 59 artists' seemingly nonfunctioning website: persuadecontent.tv; 62 Balestrini, Mara, Paul Marshall, Raymundo Cornejo, Monica Tentori, installation featured as part of "Love Has No Labels" campaign by the Ad Council: Jon Bird, and Yvonne Rogers. "Jokebox: Coordinating Shared Encounters lovehasnolabels.org in Public Spaces". Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer- 60 see relevant Wikipedia entry Supported Coopertive Work & Social Computing (2016). p. 38–49. doi: 61 YouTube video link 10.1145/2818048.2835203
29 Long-distance relationship building
Telematic Dreaming by Paul Sermon64 in Helsinki, Finland, 1992. An early and beautiful example of an artistically executed remote interaction, this piece allows two strangers at a distance of hundreds of miles to share a bed together through the magic of chromakey, overhead cameras and projectors, and a remote video feed. One user Hole in Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz63 in lays on a blue queen sized bed on a gallery floor; their New York City and Los Angeles, 1980. A pioneering image, as well as a parade of various rapidly shifting installation, Galloway and Rabinowitz cooperated with background images and videos, is projected at scale down businesses with street frontage in Manhattan and Century onto the white surface of the second queen size bed in the City to build a live, life-sized video and audio feed between other gallery space. Thus the person in the second bed the two locations. As the artists proudly note, "No signs, sees a projected bedmate next to them. (The person on sponsor logos, or credits were posted—no explanation at the blue bed does not have the benefit of the projection, all was offered." The novelty of this sort of video but can see what the other user is seeing through video connection must have been profound for the many screens around their bed, and interact with the remote thousands of people who were able to experience the piece, ghostly user in that way.) The experience of a shared which was only installed for three nights total. By the end workspace or similar area is one thing, while allowing two of the run, people were traveling to their respective "holes users to share a bed togther is really another. As the in space" to get the chance to see friends and loved ones images suggest, some users mimicked quite comfortable, whom they hadn't visited with in years. The piece serves intimate behaviors across space with their stranger bed as a wonderful example of simply allowing the magic of a partner. new technological possibility to make its own context.
63 artists' website: http://www.ecafe.com/getty/HIS/ 64 artist's website: http://www.paulsermon.org/dream/
30 Somebody67 by Miranda July across the U.S., 2014. Users downloaded an app and signed up for an account with Somebody, and then became recruited as messengers for other people's messages. If a person in Kansas wanted Call in the Night by Max Hawkins65 across the U.S., 2013. to send a message like "hey what's up? Users sign up for the Call in the Night service, and then
31 Original interactive pieces for novel engagement between strangers: process and product
In the background section we reviewed guiding underlying theory that explains in part the value, function, and potential efficacy of public interventions for creating positive social engagements. Following that, we took a brief tour of a diverse group of pieces which individually illustrate some of these qualities and motivations, and which served as inspiration.
The creative work of this thesis project is aimed at designing, producing, analyzing, and iterating upon original installation pieces which are motivated specifically to create and explore novel, unexpected, postive engagements between strangers as well as acquainted people. We will see below that the three pieces presented have a few key commonalities: they all operate in an unusual or otherwise socially transgressive fashion, and they are all predicated on the active cooperation of at least two people to successfully complete the experience. One key distinction between the pieces is that they operate on three quite different physical scales, ranging from the intimate to the very distant. They also are built with very different aesthetic sensibilities, and their driving technologies are quite different as well.
The pieces here are presented in chronological order of their development, since the experience of development, testing, and deployment of one piece often affected the following ones. Before proceeding to discussion of each of the pieces, it's worth noting in the spirit of Exploratorium founder Frank Oppenheimer that these are all definitely "unfinished" to a greater or lesser extent, and should not be thought of as complete, immutable, final versions of the works.68 Two of the projects, Touchey Facey and Start the Stop, have been built, iterated, and tested with members of the public; the third project, A Better Mousetrap, as of this writing is still in planning and early testing.
This section discusses technical developments in fairly fine detail for two main reasons: a) to review particular contributions and challenges along the development process so as to elucidate the path-specific outcomes of the pieces, and b) so that it may serve as an (albeit somewhat incomplete) fabrication guide for a practitioner who wishes to reproduce or build upon the research. As a general resource for the latter reader, to the extent possible the projects have been open-sourced and software, cut files, technical drawings, and other resources are linked in project descriptions. Touchey Facey
Touchey Facey is an intimate experience for two people where one touches the other's face over and over; the 3D location of each touch is automatically recorded by a depth camera, thereby building a point cloud of the encounter, one touch at a time. 68 Bruman, Raymond. Exploratorium Cookbook I; a Construction Manual for Exploratorium Exhibits. revised edition. The Exploratorium: San Francisco. 1991. p. vi.
32 Origins
"The sensitivity of human contact is a very enriching and rewarding experience—everyone needs it. However certain cultural and political obstacles in western culture prevent many people from obtaining such a lift." Paul Sermon, discussing his piece Telematic Dreaming69
This project originated from a class assignment in the spring 2016 session of Prof. Golan Levin's course Interactive Art and Computational Design (course 60-712). A group of students were considering how we might use an industrial robot to quantify or characterize a person's body. We discussed using the robot to probe the face— approaching until it detected contact, then backing off, and repeating this action in a matrix pattern to build a height map—and a classmate and I decided to try the same but with a person's finger or hand in the place of the robot.
It's worth noting that in the case of this project, the technical and experiential design were led at first by what seemed like simply an interesting and intriguing idea; it was only along the path of further development that it became obviously of a piece with the thesis work and therefore incorporated into this larger project.
A note on the name: the final project incorporates a Makey Makey device (described below); riffing on this, Prof. Levin jokingly dubbed it the "Touchey Facey," and it stuck.
Basic operation and user experience
A user whose face is to be touched ("touchee") reclines on a custom piece of furniture. Another user who will be doing the touching ("toucher") colors the fingernail on a finger of their choosing with a "liquid chalk marker" ("Creatov" brand). Both users wear an electrically conductive bracelet on one arm, connected by wire to the chair. Once a color calibration has been done, if necessary, the touchee simply remains still while the toucher makes repeated contact with their face using their marked finger. The toucher's fingernail points upwards towards the overhead camera while their finger pad touches the other's face. The 3D locations of these touches are recorded into a point cloud and displayed live onto a monitor for onlookers to see the progress of the facial mapping. As soon as the session is finished (as decided by the users) the toucher or touchee can have the stored point cloud data emailed to them through the software if they wish.
Development and technical notes
Hardware
Touchey Facey uses two major pieces of hardware: a depth camera and a
69 From the artist's website: http://www.paulsermon.org/dream/
33 contact sensor.
The depth-capturing camera of choice is a Microsoft Kinect, 1st generation (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA). This device, originally intended for computer and console gaming, is capable of simultaneously capturing RGB as well as depth images with reasonably good fidelity inside of a working envelope. The camera uses an infrared "structured light" emitter to shine an IR pattern at the subject range, and based on the reflection of objects in the scene reconstructs their depth relative to the lens. The inside of the depth sensing range is around 28" from the camera, and at ranges a bit beyond the inner limit, the depth resolution is fairly fine, i.e. on the millimeter scale. The camera is mounted so that the touchee's nose (the most prominent part of the face) is at least a few inches beyond the inside of the depth sensing threshold.
The depth camera is able to simultaneously range all pixels in a scene, and so if one wanted to simply use it to find the 3D contours of a person's face, they could do so very simply and quickly. Essentially, the way Touchey Facey is implemented, the system is discarding all the depth data except one single point at a time, and in this sense is terribly inefficient as a sensor—but of course that is by design.
The touch sensor is a Makey Makey Classic (Makey Makey LLC, Cocoa Beach, FL). This device is based on an Atmel microprocessor which is capable of imitating a USB mouse and keyboard to any attached computer. When two electrical elements complete a circuit, even if there is high resistance along the current path, the device will send a particular keystroke or mouse action to the computer. In the case of Touchey Facey, both electrical pins of interest are wired to bracelets with interior conductive surfaces for the toucher and touchee to wear; when the two people make contact (e.g. when the one touches the other's face), the circuit is completed and the Makey Makey sends the keystroke 'a' to the attached computer. If contact is maintained, the keystroke will be sent repeatedly in rapid succession, which means that "smearing" rather than "tapping" also works as a viable input mode for the experience. (Note that this behavior is dependent upon the key repeat rate settings of the computer.)
Two versions of the user electrode. On the right, the older copper mesh electrode, and on the left, the newer flexible bracelet.
34 Software
Custom software written in Openframeworks constantly tracks the location of the colored finger marker inside of a predefined area of the Kinect's RGB image: specifically, the center ninth. (This is because at the camera's fixed position, the touchee's face is always contained inside of that "region of interest" and scanning outside of it is unnecessary.) Experimentation showed that the best colors to use for the fingernail of interest are matte green and matte purple. The matte finish is important because it is technically difficult (as far as I've been able to determine) to disable the Kinect camera's autogain feature and reflections of any sort can easily wash out to complete white, and therefore not be trackable by color. Green and purple are also good choices because they are unlikely to appear anywhere else in the frame, unless the touchee's shirt or hair has those colors in it.
Operator's view of the point cloud acquisition software during a session; note that in the captured moment this touchee's green striped shirt has more closely matched the color search function than the toucher's green fingernail, as indicated by the red soft- ware dot towards the right of her shirt, near the bottom of the bounding box. How- ever, since the software only records points within a set distance from a point at the center of the view, that errant data is not being collected. The matrix of lighter and darker greens shows the range of saturations and brightnesses matching the currently selected hue of interest. The right half of the screen shows the current point cloud, which can be zoomed and rotated.
Originally, the color matching was done by calculating a simple Euclidean distance based on the RGB (red, green, blue) value of each pixel in the area of interest. After binarizing with this color threshold, blobs in the resulting black and white image are detected and only one blob, whose total area is inside adjustable parameters, is accepted; the centroid of this blob is considered as the location of the toucher's finger. RGB Euclidean distance was a somewhat faulty metric, however, in that it was especially sensitive to changing lighting conditions and required frequent recalibration, which is quite clumsy for the end user and can interrupt the flow of the experience. Later, switching to the HSB (hue, saturation, brightness) colorspace proved much more reliable for tracking, since hue is (theoretically) unvarying across changes in lighting level.
35 Flow of data and interactivity through the system. The software only records a point when a) a keystroke from the Makey Makey triggers it, and b) a blob matching the color search settings has been located in the center ninth of the image, and c) the (X,Y,Z) location of the proposed point is within a specified radius of a point which is approximately at the user's nose. To help the toucher know that they are successfully recording data points, the software makes a "ding" sound when a new point is record- ed.
The software used in the project is open-sourced and available on Github. Main Touchey Facey software: https://www.github.com/robzach/toucheyFacey. Ancillary display software which receives OSC data from the main application for fullscreen display: https://github.com/robzach/faceyReceiver.
Physical configuration
In the first iteration of the system, a folding cantilevered arm was used to support the downward-facing Kinect camera at a distance of about 40" off of the floor. In that configuration, the touchee would lay down on the ground (on a yoga mat to provide a modicum of comfort and help them see the proper position) and the toucher would crouch near them. This configuration suffered from a few disadvantages:
• people were understandably unenthusiastic about laying on the ground (even on a thin mat);
36 • often the toucher's head would enter into the camera frame blocking the touchee's face;
• it was uncomfortable for the toucher to change their position to rotate around the touchee's head; and
• the toucher's face was often far away from the touchee's, since it's difficult to hold one's face comfortably only a foot or two off the ground.
Despite these shortcomings, there were plenty of instances of users seemingly quite comfortably using the system. For instance, this mother-son pair were happy to work with the floor configuration:
Mother touches son's face at Maker Faire Pittsburgh, October 2016. The white back- drop on the floor helps keep the Kinect's autoexposure in an ideal range. Photo by Larry Rippel.
However, it seemed from early on that one way to significantly improve the users' experience of Touchey Facey would be to give them the chance to be more physically comfortable—and additionally, if possible, to reposition them to make it easier to move their faces closer together and thereby increase the intimacy of the experience.
In the service of working towards a more comfortable, and ultimately more rewarding, experience, I designed and fabricated a custom piece of furniture. At the least, since it is a durational experience that may for some pairs last fifteen minutes or more, increasing the users' physical comfort is likely to help increase the length and quality of sessions.
After making some dimensioned drawings of a potential design, I lasercut a simple scaled-down model out of cardboard to observe proportions and test for basic stability. Satisfied with the model, I proceeded to fabricate the chair from 1/2" Baltic birch plywood. It consists of two large sections which bolt together: the wedge-shaped support pieces and the seat and back. when these sections are separated they can fold
37 nearly flat for easy packing and transport.
Model and full-scale chair in the wood shop. Only the main body of the chair is complete in this image, lacking assembly bolts, headrest, cross-stabilizing rod, and camera support bar.
The chair features a long adjustable vertical bar to suspend the overhead Kinect camera with minimum disruption to the users. (Since the Kinect support attaches directly to the chair frame and not the ground, the Kinect is subject to some instability at the end of the long arm if the touchee shifts around in the chair. However, when the user is reasonably still the camera is sufficiently stable to gather good data.) The chair's headrest is adjustable to accommodate touchees of different heights, down to approximately 4' tall based on user experiments. The touchee is held in a comfortable reclining position with reasonably good back support, including a narrow pillow hugging the occipital bone, a bit like a dentist's chair. The touchee's head rests about one yard above the ground, depending on their height.
The toucher is seated on a low rolling stool, and because the main chair is intentionally narrow and small-footprinted in the area under the touchee's head, the toucher is able to roll about 300º around the touchee's head for good comfortable access to different parts of their face. This is actually quite important for the system to gather reliable data, because owing to the geometry of the face, finger, and camera, generally only points on the flat or 'uphill' sides of the touchee's face can be recorded by the system—reaching across the face to touch the opposite cheek, for instance, usually the toucher's finger is so far bent over that the colored fingernail is no longer visible from straight overhead.
Installation view; the foreground shows the public-facing display with data points from a typical session. The Makey Makey is attached to the near side of the chair and the Kinect is out of view above the frame. The display, which is running the faceyReceiv- er software, persistently rocks its virtual camera back and forth to give onlookers a sense of the depth of the data.
38 Start the Stop
Start the Stop is an interactive installation that is designed to encourage, and reward, cooperation between two people at a public bus stop. It is modeled on the mechanics of an Etch-a-Sketch, but with the two drawing control knobs broken out to a distance too great for one person to operate the machine well alone.
Origins and inspiration
In the winter of 2015, I aimed to build a prototype of a device intended to encourage interactions between fellow commuters at a public bus stop. I was inspired by a variety of prior work that shaped my overall thinking about the piece as well as some particular fabrication and design considerations. Two especially relevant artworks were Paul Matisse's "Pythagoras" and Janet Zweig's "Small Kindnesses, Weather Permitting" (both pictured and discussed briefly in the background chapter).
The "Pythagoras" installation at the Kendall Square T stop in Cambridge, MA is a foundational piece for my investigation of the public transit waiting area; it gives two commuters who are at a literal physical distance (standing on opposite platforms) the opportunity to make a sort of stochastic music together by operating large instruments. The interaction is not exactly tightly controlled by either user—their level of control is akin to blowing artificial wind at some large wind chimes. Still, the core idea that most inspired me in designing Start the Stop is that multiple users who are not standing in exactly the same place can engage in at least some sort of creative back-and-forth, and that the result of their engagement is easily shared by others in the vicinity.
The "Small Kindnesses, Weather Permitting" series that appears in a branch of the Minneapolis light rail system is also a direct inspiration. The pieces in that series come in a variety of physical forms but all of them have the shared quality of having physical/mechanical inputs such as buttons/levers/knobs, which trigger different forms of digital output such as playing recorded audio or video. The obviously fun, inviting nature of the mechanical inputs is a lesson unto itself: just another reminder that user inputs should look like user inputs, and if possible should pique the curiosity of
39 somebody who glances in the direction of the piece. The "Small Kindnesses" pieces have small instruction plates mounted on them ("pull the lever," etc.) but judging by the way they're built, I'm guessing these are often superfluous instructions. That is a sign of good design and usability, and with Start the Stop I aimed to achieve a similar ease of use.
Motivation and theory of operation
Inspired by "Pythagoras," "Small Kindnesses, Weather Permitting," and other pieces of public interactive art identified through research such as "21 Balançoires" and the Jokebox, I intended to build a system that was at its core interactive and cooperative.
A casual observer of bus stops in Pittsburgh, and probably most (or all) cities in the world, would find that most people grant each other Goffman's "civil inattention" as described above in the background section: that is to say, they purposefully ignore each other.
The purpose of this installation is to encourage strangers to reach beyond that inattention and exchange something deeper than a mere nod hello (if they even went so far as to do that). It is motivated by the belief that even simple, brief interactions between strangers have a real societal value in the aggregate. Empirical social research introduced above points to the finding that most people actually have a misperception about their own enjoyment of simple social engagements with strangers: people believe that talking with a stranger will be unpleasant for both parties involved, but in fact once they actually do talk with the stranger, they self-report to their surprise that they are glad they did so. The primary goal of Start the Stop, then, is the breaking of the "civil inattention" wall for the purpose of broader social improvement.
With a clearly defined purpose, the practical question of how this might be achieved is next. To start, the theory of operation relies on a system that encourages and requires cooperation between two people. However it's important that it must be able to be partially operated by one person. This quality could be termed "preferentially cooperative": the experience is designed so that a solo user can certainly engage with it and have some sort of positive interactive feedback, but it should become quickly clear to that person that recruiting a partner will greatly enrich the experience.
There is an early design question concering the extent to which the system should be obviously and explicitly goal-oriented. For instance, could the machine consist of a mechanism that requires two people to cooperate to ring a bell? Building such a simple interaction has benefits and drawbacks: on the upside, a participant may become obsessed with achieving the well-defined goal and be quite driven to recruit a partner to do so. In the sense that the goal is obvious and straightforward, it is likely to be easier to recruit participants who can see exactly how to do what they want to
40 do. However, once a simple goal (like ringing a bell) is achieved, both participants are likely to stop using the system, the dinging reward having been achieved.
Based on the foregoing thinking, during the design process it became important to ensure that the users' primary engagement would be based on some sort of shared creative activity rather than a goal-oriented one. This conclusion was heavily informed by the design suggestions drawn from a long-term study at the Exploratorium:
Building a novel "Active Prolonged Engagement"
As discussed above in the background section, Humphrey and Gutwill's Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement is a very rich reference work which describes some general findings about qualities that make exhibits into rich explorational experiences. Using the authors' language, with Start the Stop I intended to build an "active prolonged engagement" ("APE") rather than a "planned discovery" experience: essentially aiming to make an open-ended, exploratory, fun, inherently interesting piece.
Riffing on the classic children's toy Etch-a-Sketch, Start the Stop takes one knob as an X input and another as a Y input to make a line drawing. It is easy to make this sort of mechanism into a two-person experience: simply separate the knobs in space so that one person cannot reach both of them at the same time. In this configuration, about the best that a person drawing by themselves could do would be making stairs or other figures consisting only of vertical or horizontal line segments, because diagonal motion requires both control knobs to be moving at the same time. (Depending on how far apart the control knobs are, it may also be annoying or arduous to keep moving back and forth between them.) The shared experience would be drawing, which is obviously a creative rather than goal-oriented task. Finally, after a small amount of experimentation, the basic mechanics of operation would be clear to most users (partly since the Etch-a-Sketch toy is so popular in the States, and in any event decomposing the motion of the two knobs is not a very complex puzzle to solve).
Humphrey and Gutwill suggest a useful list of categories of exhibit that are likelier to empower the user: a) revealing beautiful aesthetics, b) providing the pleasure of creation, c) presenting remarkable mechanisms, and d) posing challenges that are solved by the activity.70 Start the Stop is designed, not coincidentally, to more or less accomplish all four of these goals. The second iteration of the machine is made to be aesthetically attractive through incorporation of elementally beautiful materials and textures—natural grain wood, visible metal parts, lustrous opaque white plastic gears, and a contrast between matte black and glossy yellow in the flip dots. Both iterations of the machine serve as a blank canvas for creative output. The second iteration intentionally leaves all of its driving mechanisms open to inspection and interpretation, purposefully using clear plastic panels so as not to obscure the chain paths (the first iteration of the machine hid much of the mechanism). Finally, though the machine does
70 Humphrey et al. Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement. p. 132
41 not explicitly present a challenge for the user, users frequently take a challenge upon themselves such as flipping all of the dots, drawing a certain figure or letter, etc.
The theory of operation and basic design thus decided, the next step was to put the ideas into practice, by building and testing a full-scale prototype.
Mechanical development
First iteration
The first iteration of Start the Stop was approximately 24" wide by 18" tall, and it was built to closely match the mechanism, output, and proportion of an Etch-a- Sketch. In fact, the design's starting point directly quotes the original 1962 patent for the drawing toy.
"Tracing Device" patent, no. 3,055,113
The patent mechanism is easy enough to reproduce given the appropriate configuration of pulleys, and in this iteration I use bicycle cable (of the type used to pull brakes and control gear shifting) as the mechanism of transmitting force from the two control knobs to the main box.
Bicycle cable and improvised pulleys. Though the fender washers give the guise of a large radius to the pulleys, in fact there are smaller washers between the fender wash- ers which the cables actually run around. This is a much tighter radius than the cables want to turn and consequently introduces a great deal of friction into their travel—
42 especially since they are under some tension. Note also the cable that has an errant strand beginning to separate from it in the upper left.
Carriage bolts (1/4"-20) mounted to the back wooden face of the main box serve as the posts for the pulleys to mount to. Fender washers are held in place on the bolts by locknuts so that they serve to keep the springy cables from unfurling. Using this style of hardware, the entire mechanism is built with the intention of making drawings that can cover a whole sheet of 8-1/2 × 11" paper in landscape orientation. Using carbon fiber rods as the X and Y plotter arms, I designed and 3D printed small plastic pieces to help mount the rods to the bicycle cables, and to mount them orthogonally to each other at the junction of the rods.
3D printed mating parts: cable-rod connection to the left and plotter joint to the right
The mechanism consists of two independent cable loops, each of which gets remotely driven by turning a capstan. Preferring to use existing stock parts, even if they weren't being used in their originally intended roles, I made the capstans out of 3/4"-10 bolts, threaded into electrical junction boxes. (Conveniently, the bicycle cable laid in the threads of the bolt fairly reliably.)
Homebrewed capstan mechanism. The burn marks around the bolt's entry into the junction box lid were caused when the zinc (galvanization) coating there evaporated in the heat of welding; the far side of the junction box lid has a nut TIG welded to its face.
43 Tension in the cable was difficult to manage well, but fortunately bicycle cables have tension-adjustment hardware that serve exactly this purpose. By tapping holes and threading the hardware into the electrical junction box, I was able to use these adjust- er nuts to change the tension even once the whole system was sealed and mounted. The adjusters here are near the end of their travel for adding tension.
The assembled and closed knob unit had an extremely industrial appearance. The taped-on arrows were meant to illustrate that the bolt could be turned, but regardless it was obviously not legible to most users as something they were invited to use.
The assembled machine as laid out on the floor for an overview. Note the strange an- gles and entry/exit points the cables make from the box; these were arranged like so in an attempt to reduce the number of internal pulleys needed since each pulley was evidently adding so much friction.
44 Installation view of the complete mechanism. The bus stop is at the north (inbound) side of the intersection of Forbes Ave. and Murray Ave. in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh.
Using a crayon or pencil on paper as the drawing mechanism meant that there was no possibility for the user to erase or reset the drawing. In this case, after moderate use the drawing would become a very cluttered canvas and new contributions would be hard to see, rendering the experience much less satisfying of course. I investigated building a manually-operated paper ejection mechanism, which would allow users to turn a roller and feed out one sheet of paper at a time from the machine, exposing a blank sheet beneath, but the mechanics of paper handling are notoriously finicky and after a few hours of difficulty I abandoned that effort.
The piece as seen from a vantage point high in the bus stop, showing both the draw- ing board as well as one of the control knobs mounted on the bus shelter post.
45 Installation view as seen from the road. The central box was affixed rigidly to the bus shelter, as were the two knobs; the control cables were simply zip-tied to the shelter beams to keep them inconspicuous.
In the installation view taken from a distance, the awkwardness and height of the main canvas becomes obvious—it is far above the heads of most bus stop users; the control knobs protrude like metal mounting hardware from the walls of the bus stop and don't look like knobs at all; and to make matters even less ergonomic the right knob is far too high off the ground at roughly 5 feet. (That was owing to running a few feet short of cable in final fabrication, unfortunately.) If a user does venture to try turning a knob, they find that it requires a fairly high torque to operate, and that a hex bolt is not friendly to the ungloved hand. The drawing that is produced is small and somewhat difficult to see and requires the person drawing it to crane their neck—and it is invisible to anybody who is not in (or creepily standing right behind the back wall of) the bus stop itself. Because of this, even if two people overcame the considerable challenges to collaborate on a drawing, they would likely be laboring on a drawing that nobody else would see, and therefore they would probably not successfully attact new onlookers to get interested or join in the experience.
Even despite all of these flaws, a few people were observed to individually use the system, or at least try their hand at using it; but the observation period was short enough, and the piece flawed enough, that no meaningful interaction data was gathered.
There were, in short, many more things wrong with this installation than there were right with it. Fortunately, that meant that going into the second iteration of the system I was able to incorporate a long list of known improvements to address each of these concerns and make a significantly better version of the system.
Second iteration
Approximately a year after the first iteration of Start the Stop, I began development of a second version. Going into the development of the newer version, I knew I'd need to address key shortcomings of the first:
46 • The canvas for drawing should be larger than the original was, so as to more visible from farther away and include participants and onlookers with visual impairment.
• The canvas should be located such that passers by are liable to see the current drawing without special effort if they are at the bus stop.
• The control knobs should look like control knobs so that people believe they are supposed to manipulate them.
Taking these criteria into consideration, I sketched a few possibilities for the next version of the piece. Included among them were three mechanical possibilities, all of which relied on the basic principle of separate X and Y control through knobs, but used that principle towards slightly different ends:
1. The appearance of the Etch-a-Sketch would be reproduced, albeit in neon: users manipulate a plastic stylus which presses a soft sheet of neon plastic into contact with a glass sheet. Along the path of the pressing stylus, the sheet is in close contact with the glass and imparts it a bright neon color. The drawing can be erased totally by simply pulling the sheet away from the glass surface. (This effect is exploited in a children's toy often called a "magic slate.")
2. Combining two different phenomena into a novel interaction: the various gravity-driven mechanisms of what I'll label an "oil circus" with the controllability of ferrofluid. An oil circus is a desk toy that allows colored oil to fall, usually one drop at a time, through a water environment; since the oil will not dissolve into the water, and has a different density than it, it will either flow up or down and can be made to manipulate simple mechanisms as in this toy:
47 However, that mechanism does not afford much control. Instead, I had considered using ferrofluid, an oily colloidal suspension of microscopic magnetic particles which combines fluid and ferromagnetic properties.
Since the ferrofluid can be manipulated by a magnet outside of its secure housing, it would allow two users, steering a magnet in X and Y, to pick up and move fluid around to manipulate oil-circus–like mechanisms.
These two possibilities vary in their physical implementation, to be sure, but the more important variable I considered when choosing a cooperative modality was a different one: how limited are the freedoms of the participants? In the case of the Etch-a-Sketch mechanism using the magic slate, theoretically the two users could make any drawing they liked, and so in that sense it is quite free. Conversely, in the case of the ferrofluid oil circus, the users would have probably a only a handful of mechanical actions they could trigger by moving their magnetic fluid around carefully.
It is actually quite bewildering to give users total freedom to draw whatever they want—consider the surprising challenge of being given a pencil and paper and instructed to "draw something." But having only the freedom to move a few fluid- driven wheels or seesaws is not quite enough. Instead, I chose a different mechanism whose chief advantage is that it seemingly offers users a Goldilocks quantity of creative decisionmaking.
The compromise between freedom and constraint was to allow for free drawing along any path the users wanted, but within a strictly limited resolution regime— basically, heavy pixelation. By turning the drawing into a low-res bitmap, where each pixel could be only either on or off, the users could not fret about how their drawing does not look exactly like a perfect circle or puppy, because the medium already precluded those outcomes.
In addition to liberating users from most worries about drawing fidelity, the pixelated drawing mechanism has three other distinct advantages that make it an attractive choice. First, it allows for certain natural self-imposed challenges for users, such as fill in all of the dots, or only alternating rows, etc. Second, the drawings that are produced are likely to be of an abstract nature so that different beholders could possibly see different interpretations of the same board: it would work as a Rorschach ink blot in this case and perhaps people could discuss what they saw in the drawn
48 pattern. Finally, if the pixels are large enough, the drawn output would be visible from a significant distance, increasing the odds of drawing interested people towards the piece.
The aesthetic and functional decision having been made, the next step was implementation of the pixelated drawing mechanism. Fortunately, there is an existing model for this sort of display that served as an excellent starting point.
Flip-dot display
A flip-dot display typically represents text or images using a matrix of electromechanically operated physical pixels. These sorts of displays often appear in public transit systems, for instance in the case of this bus sign:
The individual element of these displays is a circular disc on a pivot with an embedded magnet; solenoids can be triggered to mechanically push the dot to be oriented one way or the other. The dot typically has a yellow side and a black side, and so its orientation determines whether it appears "on" (yellow) or "off" (black).
I set out to build my own flip dots using permanent magnets instead of solenoids (electromagnets) to activate the flipping action. The first prototyping session ended with implementing three rectangular flipping pixels that flipped from the default position of dark (in this case, plain cardboard) to light (in this case, silver). A magnetic field of the correct orientation pushes on a magnet mounted to the pixel to induce the rotation. Here's a gif of the first prototype pixel moving through its range of motion (imagine a magnet doing the pushing):
49 Further development and imitating the round dots of the standard flip dot display .
Developing a lasercut version of the mechanism was the next step to building a larger-scale model that had as many machine-cut parts as possible for consistency and accuracy.
Assembled and glued 6×4 array.
A properly oriented magnet passing behind the dots flips them so they expose their yellow side:
The magnetic pusher only flips the dots over in one direction; some other mechanism was needed to return them to their unflipped state so that the drawing board could be reset. For this purpose, a frame of precisely sized rectangles fits over the pixel array and sits in front of the flip dots. As the final product is cut from clear 1/8" acrylic and so is difficult to see, here is a sample reset frame for a 6×4 array:
50 This frame sits ~5mm in front of the board carrying all of the dots. When the reset frame is pushed up, all the dots are flipped back over and reset to their initial state. Then the frame falls back down to its original position, and the board is ready for a new drawing.
Rather than using wire rope for transmission of force as in the first iteration, I selected #10 ball chain, which has the useful properties of being unable to hold any torsion that could lead to tangling (since every link is a swivel), as well as being easily used as a transmission chain that is quite misalignment tolerant. Shown here is a full scale prototype of the drive chain showing the plotter mechanism moving the big silver magnet as controlled in X and Y. The hands are manually pulling a chain back and forth but in the completed installation, that motion will be driven by users turning the control knobs.
Having validated the fundamental mechanism of this version of the machine, all that was left was to scale it up and solve the myriad mechanical problems that emerged along the way. One detail worth noting was a decision about the dimensioning of each pixel, which of course also dictated the overall number of pixels that would fit
51 into the working area of the plotter. Too large pixels would reduce the total resolution to the point where it was not possible to make a legible drawing; at the same time any linear reduction in pixel dimension was a quadratic increase in moving parts in the mechanism prone to failure, not to mention assembly time. Rather than describing the many iterated design determinations in detail, below are some key images of completed subassemblies of Start the Stop.
Control knob; inset showing the path of the chain along the sprocket affixed to the knob shaft.
Chain pulleys in the main box. They are anchored only to the front face of the box, which is a sheet of 1/4" clear acrylic with lasercut square insertion points for the carriage bolts.
In-line springs on each of the control loops maintain tension while allowing for small
52 irregularities. The springs are positioned along the top center section of the chain, which never needs to pass through a sprocket so jamming on the spring is not an issue.
Reset knob mechanism. When turned clockwise, the handle tilts the rocker bar behind it (seen through the acrylic face) clockwise as well, and the left side of the rocker raises the reset board which rests on it. The right side of the rocker soon hits the stop block so that the rocker has a carefully constrained range of motion and the re- set board cannot be raised more than about 2 centimeters. The back side of the axle is supported by the bearing block behind the rocker bar.
Method of attaching the main box to the bus stop glass: a 2-56 bolt passes through the existing space between the two large panes of glass forming the back of the bus stop, into a threaded hole in the aluminum frame that the suction cups mount to. When this bolt is tightened, the suction-cup surface along the back edge of the instal- lation is pulled toward the glass, holding it firmly in place without any damage. There is one such bolt at the top center and another at the bottom center of the main box.
53 Installation view from the back of the shelter
Installation view from the front of the shelter
54 A Better Mousetrap
A Better Mousetrap is a long-distance interaction concept, intended specifically to encourage positive engagements between people in two different hardware store locations. It is in design and early prototyping as of this writing.
Origins and intention
The inspiration for A Better Mousetrap was informed by working on Touchey Facey and Start the Stop before it. With both of those pieces, I was working to foster meaningful interactions between people in the same space—in the case of Touchey Facey, the participants are already willing to engage each other in a very close, intimate way; in the case of Start the Stop, the participants are strangers at the same bus stop. In both cases, the collaborators are sharing a physical space as a baseline. When one of the more divisive elections in recent memory happened in November 2016, it brought to the fore some social divisions that were obviously important on a much larger scale.
As mentioned above in the introduction, there is data pointing to an increased rural/urban divide at least in simply political terms. This is evidenced by a sharply increasing number of Americans who live in "landslide counties": while the country taken as a whole is fairly "purple" (evenly split between Democratic and Republican voters) an increasing number of voters live in an area where their political preference is very likely to be shared by their neighbors.
A great deal of political hay can be made from demonizing the other, and that's even easier to do when those "others" are physically distant and therefore unable to prove themselves to be more than the two-dimensional strawmen they might be depicted as. (The contribution of internet-mediated social interactions to this problem is well known; in that realm the effect is reinforced by a "filter bubble" of confirmatory
55 news and opinions.) Too often, the result on a large scale is a very real fear and loathing of perceived political and cultural enemies, which frequently falls across geographical lines insofar as they align with political ones.
A Better Mousetrap is designed to give individual people a chance to break through these barriers. It is a distance-interaction system intended to encourage the same experience of physical problem-solving and creative engagement as Start the Stop, while being preferentially cooperative across two workspaces connected through a data link. It does this without using any explicit political messaging or beating users about the head with entreaties to be kind to each other; the hope is that these messages are more or less self-revelatory once people have had a structured opportunity to break through a stereotypical judgment and humanize the "other."
A key partner in this project, Busy Beaver is a regional, independently owned hardware store chain with 16 locations in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Through a previously extant partnership, I knew that their upper management was interested in the prospect of an interactive installation piece in one of their stores. Once I had the kernel of the A Better Mousetrap concept, I pitched the store's CEO, Joe Kallen, and he agreed to further implementation discussions, which are ongoing.
Finally, it is worth noting that part of the impetus for installing A Better Mousetrap in a hardware store is a secondary goal that has no bearing on the political valence of the urban/rural division: I am interested in evangelizing the empowering message that you, hardware store customer, can spend a few dollars in the hardware aisle and make something fun, interesting, and new. I see the hardware store as an incredible collection of possibilities, and I hope that seeing and interacting with simple, obviously homemade hardware contraptions will afford people the chance to consider making something, actualizing an idea, or expressing mechanical agency when they otherwise might not have considered the possibility.
Interaction design
First pass interaction and scaling prototype. The solenoid (detailed in the inset) ejects a ball that is waiting in a queue in the slanted pipe.
56 A Better Mousetrap is designed to be in a hardware store, and also to be very clearly of a hardware store. The installation is meant to appear, even at first glance, like it is obviously made from parts that come from no farther than a few aisles away. It is a bit rough around the edges and looks it, built with stock metal sawed down by hand, imperfectly cut pieces of PVC, and other easily identifiable hardware store pieces. The protruding long metal floor of the device means that magnet-base parts can be positioned very reliably and stably.
Three test mechanisms: ball slide, dominoes, and adjustable ball run or seesaw.
The basic interaction mode is at once quoting a Rube Goldberg machine (an unnecessarily complex kinematic linkage meant as an amusement or challenge) and the children's game Mousetrap (a game built around a long chain reaction that ultimately lowers a cage over a model mouse). The user, on approaching the machine, notices a location where a ball will be spit out towards them, and another place with a small collecting basket leading to a return hole: this is where that ejected ball (or another ball) must end up. The basic goal is to build a kinematic chain, using any combination of prebuilt and user-assembled pieces from the table, which will be triggered by the ball coming out of the ball ejector and eventually return a ball to the ball collector.
Pegboard back wall concept sketch
When a ball passes into the ball collector (i.e. when the goal is achieved), it may have one of a few effects, depending on the configuration of the machine: it may immediately kick a ball out from the ball ejector, starting the process over again locally,
57 or begin a countdown timer to do the same, or trigger a remote event. This third option is where the system becomes interactive over distance.
The "remote event" is designed to happen in near–real time at the mirrored kiosk, located in the paired hardware store. If a ball goes in to the local collector, the remote ball ejector fires within a second or two. That action would, of course, be totally opaque to both the local and remote users, were the stations not also connected with a live video link, so that each can see the action happening at the far side of the interaction.
Longitudinal concept sketch
To summarize the interaction flow: the user approaches A Better Mousetrap and either through reading signage, or an automatically triggered ball release based on a motion detector, or perhaps on-screen instructions, they come to understand the goal of turning a ball kicked out towards them into a ball returned into the system. They experiment with building a chain to do so, and if they're successful, they can see through a video monitor that their local action has a remote effect.
The primary interaction components of the system are all purely mechanical devices (ramps, seesaws, dominoes, etc.) and I hope that the joy of pure experimentation and creative building with these components will be a draw for users. In addition to these prebuilt parts, I am interested in experimenting with leaving out nuts, bolts, washers, perforated sheets and angle brackets, hinges, and other simple hardware store components of an Erector set to allow participants to make totally original parts. Leaving out extra magnetic bases, as well as hardware to mate with these, means that user-built parts can have reliable footing and work just as well or better than the premade pieces.
Store selection
The idea for the installation is to select two branches of the store where shoppers are, statistically speaking, more likely to be politically opposed; for shorthand, this simply means one store in the city and one store in a more rural area. If two shoppers in these different locations can have an unexpected, fun, cooperative
58 experience together while they are shopping for hardware, then that experience may better allow each participant to humanize the other.
Selecting two store locations to host the installations is then a matter of finding those stores with the greatest political difference between them. Though shoppers don't necessarily live immediately next to the location they shop at, it is a reasonable assumption that most people go to the nearest location when shopping. By overlaying the location of Busy Beaver stores in Allegheny County onto a district-level voting returns map from the election, the general political bent of the area surrounding each store—and therefore its assumed median customer—was illustrated.
Busy Beaver locations overlaid on district-level 2016 general election voting returns in Allegheny County. Darker blue areas voted more for Clinton and lighter blue more for Trump. Data from the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center.
The best pairing found, as well as the most logistically preferable for the installation process, was Lawrenceville and White Oak. Lawrenceville is known as the "Brooklyn" of Pittsburgh and is in an area where about 75% of residents voted for Clinton; White Oak, in the fairly low-density southeastern corner of the county, definitely has a different social/cultural feel, and is in an area where about 35% of residents voted for Clinton. (It is worth noting that White Oak is fairly close to McKeesport, a small urban center with very high Clinton support; however in every other direction it is surrounded by areas with approximately the 35% Clinton support quoted.)
Inside both of the hardware stores, A Better Mousetrap is to be installed in a location where it is likeliest to attract users, i.e. an area with fairly high foot traffic. It will likely go to an "end cap" of an row facing towards the main aisle of each store. These end caps consist of shelving units approximately 2 feet deep and 6 feet wide; often temporary special deals are placed in these locations, and it is obvious from the way the stores use the spaces that they know these areas enjoy high traffic.
59 Caveats, questions, and next steps
While A Better Mousetrap is at this point a fairly well-developed idea, there are many questions yet to be addressed surrounding implementation as well as basic efficacy. To point out a few known matters:
• How might the actual interaction between remote users be designed so that it's reliably cooperative and meaningful? The current plans call for a video feed but no good way of communication (beyond hand signalling perhaps).
Though they may understand from the video feed that their actions are triggering a remote effect, participants are unlikely to connect meaningfully in the current scenario. An earlier iteration of the system envisioned each kiosk including a fixed receipt printer as well as a keyboard; users would be able to write messages to each other, which would print both locally (on their own reciept printer) as well as remotely. Perhaps there could be an audio component: a telephone receiver at each end would allow users to talk if they so wished. The system could even make the phone connection an explicit reward—if it detects that a kinematic loop was completed all the way through both locations, it would ring both phones so that the parties would be able to speak with each other. (There is precedent for this communication-as- reward model in the exhibit "The Red Phone" at the Exploratorium: if a museum visitor communicates a vault-unlocking code to another visitor through a shared phone line, upon opening the vault they see that it provides a mutually visible video feed.)
• The kinematic chains may be too difficult to build, and/or participants may not understand that there's an expectation that they build them.
The installation is likely to need good signage, a looping explanatory video, or some other way of communicating the construction goal to the participant. Regarding difficulty of building a working kinematic chain: a sample working chain could be illustrated as a starting point; the mechanism of the machine could be modified so that the challenge is reduced; and/or more complete assemblies or subassemblies of parts may need to be added so that an easier starting point is established.
• Participants may just feed free bearing balls into the detector and fool it.
This is certainly a possibility. My hope is that either a) that action quickly becomes boring so participants move on to the more interesting challenge of actually setting up the kinematic chain, or b) the participant comes up with a new and different gameplay on their own, which is a great outcome. If that gameplay involves feeding bearing balls into the receptacle or holding a piece of paper in it so it thinks it is constantly being fed with new balls, then so be it. Furthermore, some exploratory "gaming the system," i.e. experimenting to understand how the system works, or how it's detecting the balls coming into the tube, etc., is not something I'd want to
60 discourage.
• Pieces may get stolen.
This is an inherent risk that goes with having untethered objects out in public. The fact that the installation is in a retail environment means most participants will have a general expectation that they may be surveilled electronically or by store employees. The more expensive aspects of the system are the computer monitor, webcam, and computer running the system; these will all be affixed rigidly so the odds of their being stolen are low. Small parts (screws, bearing balls, etc.) may need to be replenished from time to time, but that is typical for any installation piece with small loose parts.
Installation concept rendering with two paired stations. One possibility in this arrange- ment is that one station is linked to the other local one, and that one in turn is linked to a remote station; this would have the advantage of illustrating the linking principal and perhaps reducing or avoiding the need for an explicit explanation.
Further development of A Better Mousetrap is planned for the summer of 2017.
61 Results, interpretation, and next steps
typically interaction typical time keepsake senses done whole-body technological aesthetic project distance spent output primarily between pose mode sensibility regime engaged strangers
Touchey centimeter 5–10 minutes yes kinesthetic no yes digital hacky with Facey polish
playful Start the meter 1–3 minutes no kinesthetic yes no mechanical museum Stop and visual exhibit
A Better kilometer ? no kinesthetic yes no digital and raw hardware Mousetrap and visual mechanical
We have discussed motivations and methods of three different pieces of public- facing interactive work (briefly summarized above), and detailed implementations of two of them. In this concluding section we critique their efficacy and review observations of people's engagement with the two developed pieces, frame the work theoretically, and suggest next steps for each of the projects based on lessons learned from the development work up to this point.
In the professional practice of museum exhibit evaluation, a distinction is drawn between summative evaluations (done on completed works, to analyze their impact and inform future works) and formative evaluations (done on ongoing works, to suggest improvements that may be made).71 All of the discussion here is certainly intended to be formative and in the spirit of improving ongoing projects rather than writing a post mortem. Touchey Facey Observed outcomes
People who use Touchey Facey are invited to have an intimate experience that is probably unlike anything in their regular life (unless they are a massage therapist or have some other body-contact practice). Participation in the piece demands that the users behave in ways that transgress regular social norms, and furthermore that they do so while in a public space where the piece is being shown.
Most pairs of users engage with Touchey Facey for five to ten focused minutes once they're underway. Perhaps in part because it's a built object involving technological experience through a specified and unfamiliar process, users take engagement fairly seriously—they are quite attentive to the verbal instructions of the facilitator and willing to carefully arrange their bodies as instructed, have an electrode wrapped around their wrist, get an odd colored marker painted onto their fingernail and obediently hold their hand in a specific location for calibration, etc. Otherwise very active children (and adults) become singlemindedly engaged with the system, when 71 Practical Evaluation Guide; Tools for Museums and Other Informal Educational Settings, 3rd ed. Judy Diamond, Michael Horn, and David Uttal, eds. Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham. 2016. pp. 3–4.
62 they're in either role.
Perhaps partly because it comes dressed in the garb of technicality—i.e. because it's obviously a new-media, high-tech built piece—Touchey Facey seems to be perceived with an aura of seriousness. Doubtless there are other factors contributing to the users' perceptions of the system: for one, the furniture and reclining pose evoke the (also serious) medical/dental setting, where people are well conditioned to move their bodies as instructed by professionals and purposefully undergo uncomfortable and unusual experiences. Quoting from the paradigm of this familiar circumstance, the users might be subconsciously predisposed to a deeper level of suggestability than they would otherwise be.
The behavior of pairs using the system varies fairly widely. Some touchers take the opportunity to behave almost completely unbound by regular rules of public comportment; they touch people's faces anywhere they want, pick the touchee's nose, put their finger into the touchee's mouth. (Unsurprisingly, I've only observed this sort of interaction between people who obviously already are quite comfortable with each other.) Most pairs are more conservative and touch each others' faces more politely, and in ways that are fairly stable across participants.
A typical pair of users, demonstrating an average level of comfort. Note that all of the touches are on the forehead, cheeks, nose, and chin; most point clouds generated by sessions look roughly like this. Most people do not touch each other's eyes or lips. (Left: session still; right: completed point cloud.)
63 A pair of people who are unusually comfortable with each other. The toucher in this case used the "swiping" method of running their finger in long series of lines around the touchee's face, with little pattern. Note the data collected near the tongue; in fact these points were recorded inside the touchee's mouth. (Left: session still; right: completed point cloud.)
Many touchers fairly haphazardly move all about the face, jumping from one area to the next, gathering clusters of points at a time. Occasionally, certain pairs of participants have proved themselves extremely careful, methodical, and patient.
Showing the piece at Maker Faire Pittsburgh (a gathering of local builders, educators, and creative types), a group of young men approached the exhibit and wanted to try it. I did not conduct an interview with them, but they did not seem like an especially touchy-feely group; they had a sort of proudly nerdy affect about them. Over the course of perhaps 20 to 30 minutes, one friend extremely methodically touched the other's face, proceeding in an slow, careful raster pattern so as to gather very complete data. In total I have data from 88 touching sessions recorded, representing perhaps 20 hours of pairs touching, and the median touches per session is 1,001. This pair of young men, who probably do not have much occasion to slowly and gently touch each others' faces in normal circumstances, recorded 15 thousand touches, which is double the next highest touch session. The picture tells the story:
64 Joshua's (pseudonym) face, as recorded in 14,522 touches by his friend. They did such a good, careful job that it allowed me for the first time to see the resolution limit of the Kinect sensor.
Of course each pair of interactants has their own dynamic, much of which does not show up on the screen. Two vignettes:
• A retirement-age father with his family was coaxed into being a touchee by his wife. After grimacing at the idea, he reluctantly got into position and his wife started to touch his face as a smile crept in and his whole affect shifted.
• As a young woman touched her boyfriend's face, he said, "now I am an object." She paused, then responded quietly, "it doesn't feel that way with me, does it?"
Next steps
While Touchey Facey is a fairly robust system, which has shown itself to allow for interesting engagements among a variety of people in a variety of settings, there are both technical and experiential aspects of the system that could be improved. The color recognition system, which needs to identify a small moving area of a particular target color, is not as effective as it should be; despite using unique color markers and computing in the HSB color space, it is still prone both to false positives and false negatives. (Though with the distance filtering mechanism in the software, almost all errant points—false positives—get rejected so they do not appear in the final point cloud.) It seems minor, but successfully turning off the Kinect's auto-gain would probably help a great deal in this realm; but the device was never intended to be hackable and some low-level hardware communication tasks are nontrivial.
A larger future leap for the project would be to make a totally self-sufficient museum-style experience that does not need to be facilitated. To build that out successfully would require addressing a handful of unrelated challenges:
• build sufficient signage, diagrams, instructional video, etc. so that a pair of
65 uninitiated museum users could set their bodies up properly and have a successful touching session,
• reconfigure the electrodes so the two users can participate without wearing wristbands,
• address the problem of affixing colored markers—perhaps the user presses their fingernail into a dampened pad to paint it?, and
• add a built-in lighting system for reliability.
Finally, there is a major shortcoming I haven't yet addressed in the current practice of Touchey Facey: nearly all participants are not strangers. The solution to this problem probably lies in recontextualizing the experience rather than changing anything about the setup itself. Instead of being something that people approach in pairs, perhaps there are two deli-counter number dispensers and people get paired randomly with strangers in an art gallery by choosing the same number; or two queues that can't see each other form, and one pair at a time going through the experience72. However it is managed, it's certain that Touchey Facey between strangers would be quite a different experience than it is between people who know each other, and sure to produce some interesting results. Start the Stop Observed outcomes
After several aborted attempts owing to measurement errors and parts unexpectedly coming loose, Start the Stop was installed and interactions were observed for roughly 10 total hours over the course of two days in May 2017. The sessions were so abbreviated both because there was a limited window of permission from the City government in which the piece could be installed, and because mechanical problems cropped up repeatedly which required deinstalling the piece, reparing it back on campus, and reinstalling. Despite the short window, however, there was time to observe people have a series of successful engagements with Start the Stop as well as plenty of unsuccessful ones. (As I was observing mainly from across the street I was not usually privy to people's conversations, if they had any, so had to judge from what I could see.)
It did not take long for people to begin to notice the new presence in the bus stop and try their hand at interactions with it. In fact, a model episode happened only a few minutes after completing the installation. Watching it unfold felt a bit like the participants were plants somebody had surreptitiously given instructions to.
72 My thanks to Daragh Byrne for this suggestion.
66 A man by himself at the bus stop stood outside the stop while he waited, as many people do,
but then he saw the installation inside the bus stop, went in, and started playing with it.
Soon two people came to the bus stop, and the man showed them how the system he'd discovered worked.
67 The three of them shared a laugh together, and
they even roped in a fourth interested person!
Shortly after the last picture was taken, the bus came and when it passed the stop was empty again. The whole episode, from the man arriving at the stop to everybody getting on the bus, lasted about 3 minutes and 45 seconds.
Of course not all of the interactions were as successful as that early one. A man started using the system while only he and a woman facing out of the front of the stop were present. He started moving back and forth between the two knobs as he coordinated making a drawing with himself:
68 But then as the bus stop slowly filled with other people, he did not yield control at any point—not even letting a young child looking on with interest try it out.
Shortly thereafter, the bus came and the stop was empty again. In this case, though the installation served as a locus of interest for four people, only one of them actually used it—this is the sort of outcome one might expect if the knobs had been installed on the front of the box instead of outside of a single person's reach.
It quickly became obvious that many people did not understand how to begin interacting with the machine, because they either could not see the red control knobs, or did not understand that those knobs were meant to be manipulated. This surprised me, because the knobs in the second iteration are large, red, and look like knobs—this was an explicit improvement on the first iteration knobs which were very mechanical in appearance. Perhaps the flaw of the new knobs was that they were installed close to the corners of the bus stop and either were simply out of the line of sight for many users, or appeared to be structural parts that were helping support the piece and therefore not manipulable:
69 In any case, as an attempted solution to this problem, I posted simple instructions in large print on the main control box:
Surprisingly, this did not seem to make a big difference. In fact, I repeatedly observed people read the sign (I could tell because it was so large they were moving their head) and look for and fail to find the knobs which were a few feet below eye level and nearly within an arm's length of where they were standing. Obviously the control mechanisms in future installations will need to be made much clearer.
After I had done a morning installation one day, taken the piece down for repairs, and reinstalled in the afternoon, I took more pictures of people having brief interactions. They were not especially noteworthy until I later looked back at the images:
A woman turns the reset knob by herself.
A man arrives on the scene and starts working with her
70 It is the same man who earlier in the day rallied three other people to join him at the machine! But he is drawing by himself—the initially interested woman stands back.
Unfortunately the result is not always cooperation. Soon after this picture, grey-sweatshirt man stopped using the machine alone and stood using his phone, waiting for his bus like everybody else.
I was so pleasantly surprised to see the grey-sweatshirt man from 9:30am come back to the same bus stop at 2:30pm and again try to rally people to draw together. In Balestrini et al.'s experiments with the "Jokebox" interaction at a bus station (described above in the background section), the researchers observed people who would spend time near their installation, inviting others to try it out or otherwise facilitating the interactions. They labeled these people "champions," and it is gratifying and exciting to see that Start the Stop grew a champion of its own within less than a day of having been installed. Perhaps the unsuccessful nature of the champion's second interaction serves as a reminder that even when conditions are optimal (and there's somebody excited to get people on board), it can be difficult to get people to engage with something new and unknown.
Next steps
This summer, I will be participating in the Tough Art residency73 at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. I proposed constructing a two-person interactive drawing system, predicated on the same basic mechanics as Start the Stop, and so I will be building on the present work to make an interactive installation for the museum setting. I plan to integrate a great deal of nuts-and-bolts learning I did about how to best make 73 See https://pittsburghkids.org/exhibits/tough-art for more information
71 things move smoothly and reliably, but also some interaction lessons gained from the prototyping I did:
• The control knobs must be obviously control knobs; must be reasonably easy to turn; and must be in a location that people of different stature and physical ability can access them.
• The reset knob should be redesigned so that it is more obviously something that gets pushed only once, and only in one direction, to do its job.
• The reset mechanism is not ideal and should be redesigned; in its current form it's too heavy, unreliable, and prone to misalignment trouble.
• Ideally the walls of the enclosure should be clear so that the magnet plotter mechanism can be more visible to users.v
I look forward to making these and other improvements over the course of the summer as I work on the next version of the project!
As I was installing the first time, this mother signalled me from across the street, asking if she and her son could come play with the piece. They waited for me to finish affixing it, and then she and her son worked together for about 5 minutes, going back and forth to carefully fill in every pixel—my first beta testers out in the wild and hope- fully a sign of more good family interactions to come this summer at the Museum. Tying the threads together Shifting the context
Goffman describes the "civil inattention" that people afford each other in public spaces: absent some compelling reason, people in public do not engage with each other without good reason. But he also points out some special circumstances that allow for people to engage each other when they normally would be prohibited from doing so: it is perfectly permissible, for instance, for strangers to talk with drunk people or people in costume. Goffman's explanation for this is that those people are "out of role"—
72 essentially, since they are not their regular selves, they can dissociate from any stigma that might be attached to them in the moment of being out of role. In this way, people who are out of role have a sort of social superpower in that they're able to relate to others much more readily than they would normally be able to.
Perhaps a sociological force that animates the otherwise fairly disparate Touchey Facey, Start the Stop, and A Better Mousetrap is that they all give the people engaging with them the special and atypical opportunity to step outside of their regular selves and try something different. People do not methodically poke each others' faces in public—but given a shifted context in which their regular self and its fragilities can be set aside for a moment, perhaps they can try something bizarre. People don't talk at bus stops, but if there's something strange and unexpected, perhaps they can go out on a limb and try it out, especially if everybody at the bus stop is interested in investigating this new stimulus together. Hardware stores don't normally have miniature bearing ball roller-coaster portals to other hardware stores, and so on. In this way, the careful construction of the alternative circumstance may give participants the opportunity to engagage in an alternative self and thereby open avenues to social engagement that would otherwise have been closed.
It is important to note that for all of these pieces my purpose in building and installing them is not, precisely speaking, to encourage outward (i.e. visible) changes in behavior. Of course it is very fulfilling to see that people at a bus stop begin talking with each other when they otherwise might not have because of the presence of an installation. That sort of changed behavior serves as good evidence pointing towards my desired outcome, but it should not be conflated with that outcome itself, which lies in the minds of the participants, unknowable and invisible to the observer. If two people have an interesting, fun, or elucidating experience using Touchey Facey and then feel a deeper sense of connection with each other, then that is an unambiguously successful outcome. Likewise with the other pieces: if by engaging with one of these interactive experiences, the participant slightly reassesses their pessimistic assumptions about other people, or is reminded of the value of positive cooperation with strangers, or the joy of solving a problem together, then the work will have been a success.
Advice to my past self
Having learned a lot through the experience of developing, evaluating, and iterating upon these and other projects over the course of this degree program, I will close this document with advice that I would like to have given myself about two years ago, in the hope that it may be instructive to other students of tangible interaction.
• Early drawings are remarkably useful to building understanding of new objects and interactions. Take the time to do drawings even if they are sketchy. Drawing is faster than making, and will inform the making in very useful ways.
73 • You do not know what people will do when you present them with something new. You will only find out by trying it.
• What is obvious to you, the designer, may be invisible to the user, and vice versa.
• Set your work out into the world, and then prepare to be surprised, delighted, and confused by the ways people engage with it.
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