The Creating Assemblies in Public Environments: Social Interaction, Interactive Exhibits and CSCW [[i]]

This paper investigates the ways in which people collaboratively encounter spaces and explore technology with specific attention to museums and low-tech assemblies. It details three installations which were carried out, looks at the practices of assembly in order to develop a series of ‘design sensitivities’ in the development of a technological installation for the purpose of examining the distinctive characteristics of social informal interaction in public spaces. Throughout it acknowledges the disregard for looking at behavior in public since the early 1970’s and provides a microcosm with which to explore this area. The core focus of the paper is on the Ghost Ship project, which was deployed during the SOFA Exposition in Chicago, USA. It was very much successful as a work of interactive art and through audio-visual recordings familiar in CSCW, the way in which it was encountered was analyzed so as to inform future design and development work. This project takes its lead from the studies of visitor behavior, research and data analysis of a previous project in order to consider how people in and through their interaction with others make sense of the space and the technology. It is inspired by the substantial body of research concerned with media spaces in CSCW. A detailed description of the work can be found in the exhibition catalogue. ^[[ii]] Points of interest from the project of particular interest in public installations, was the way in which users not only interacted with the technology but also played with the discovered functionality, exploring its possibilities, being creative, playful, humorous and fun. It also showed the way in which the installation sustained the interest of the users by allowing them to configure the installation in order to create and develop novel forms of interaction and participation, and to create experiences for others. The third project mentioned in the paper, Keepsake, outlined the importance of considering traffic flow in the area prior to development, as this was the main reason the project failed to impact. The outcomes of the exhibitions critical analysis lead to the development of ‘design sensitivities’. These included

• Providing resources for participants to creatively shape and configure the experience, in order to move away from a stimulus response and towards real-time transformation
• The need to provide opportunities of interaction by considering different forms of communication including verbal / non-verbal, individuals / groups, companions / strangers, passive / active, central / peripheral
• Careful organizing of the placement of the action and the viewing
• The consideration of reverse scalability by recognizing the need for designing for few as well as many

---

[i] Creating Assemblies in Public Environments: Social Interaction, Interactive Exhibits and CSCW

[ii] Coatts, Margot (2001): Jason Cleverly and the Ghost Ship, Sculpture Objects and Functional Art 2001 Catlog, Chigago: Expressions of Culture, Inc., pp. 28-31