Part 1: It All Began With An HCI Concept

Spring 2016

As the idea of ubiquitous computing is spreading out, designers are trying to rethink the role of public place and tend to believe that public place can do more than it currently does. UbiDisplay started as the Public Display Utilization (PDU) project, which aims to utilize public displays and the Internet to enhance human communication, providing shared displays to people with the information they need. The purpose of PDU is to go beyond traditional channels of receiving information, and to offer new ways for human communication. PDU is going to let people receive information in more places, more often, and with less distractions.

The problem this project aims to solve is the lack of flexibility and efficiency of the public screens, including billboards, screens in the subway stations, and kiosks in supermarkets. Those screens attract people’s attention only in a few occasions; more often they are in a “standing by” mode, waiting for people to notice them instead of interacting with them proactively. PDU seeks to integrate users as part of a display (or entire display for a limited time), showing personalized information with the help of wireless technology.

A recent design prototype from a research team of University of Washington has revealed the idea of turning the Seattle’s light rail station into a public art exhibition. They plan to develop a mobile application that allows users to interact with the transit area; they can draw on the app, and their artworks will be shown on the tunnel displays. (Tweeddale, 2016) Going off that idea, PDU plans to expand the functionalities of public displays and turn them into an extent screen for everybody.

Interaction design

Interaction design is the new focus of information technology. As Terry Winograd argues in his paper From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design, “The computer, with its attendant peripherals and networks, is a machine that provides new ways for people to communicate with other people” (Winograd, 1997). Thus, the focus on this project is to create a new way for people to communicate. Communication involves inputs and outputs. In this project, the output will be leading the direction.

Social translucent

PDU aims to create a social translucent system where users are mutually aware of each other while keeping a safe distance. In the paper Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes, Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg suggested that the foundation of social translucent system are visibility, awareness, and accountability (Erickson, 2000); the PDU has all three attributes. First, public displays are visible to everyone nearby. It is not an exclusive system that prevents other users from seeing it. As it comes to awareness, both the user and people around will be aware of the usage of the system in their surroundings when he/she gets access to the system. PDU also meets the requirement of accountability since the user is accountable for the result shown in the display. PDU seeks to apply the Erickson’s ideology in the project, creating windows to allow users to both see more and see through.

Beyond commuting

PDU fully embraces the idea of “beyond being there” proposed by Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta in their article Beyond Being There. In the article, the author provides a new idea that human communication technology can go beyond the face-to-face imitation and create new ways of interaction. PDU focuses on creating more information receiving spots for people around the public places, from which users will have more options in receiving information. Unlike traditional information sources as voice, text, and images on people’s phone, public screens can be more convenient, since the user does not need to take their devices out. They can also be faster when the user only has a glance of the display. These new interaction methods are not substitutes for human communication, but complements to it, augmenting the user’s reality.

Part 2: Design Concept Prototyped and Tested

Localized control

The key feature of ODU is the control center on users’ side. Bradley Rhodes and his colleagues claimed that when developing ubiquitous system, “it is often difficult to maintain personalization of ubiquitous computing system. In the worst case, every time a new person joins a work-group or community her personal profile needs to be added to every device” (Rhodes, 1999). However, ODU's localized control mechanism keeps the system customizable so that the users can determine what to show on the big screen. According to the design, the information will not go through the Internet at all.

Part 3: Push the Boundary of Fidelity

Spring 2018

In spring 2018, I had graduated from University of Washington. However, the project got carried on at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In this new environment came new sparkles. "This is such a great idea. Let's make it hi-fi and submit it to a design contest!" my classmate said to me. Why not? I had been waiting for this moment for 2 years. I always have strong attachment to my old (I prefer the word "classic") projects. I don't want to store them in a cabinet like it's something to get me a B+ in school. They are great projects made with my great effort. I want to continue refining them and I did several times. Because it was for a design contest, we needed a cooler name. I decided to name it "UbiDisplay" for its origination of a ubiquitous computing concept.

Making it high fidelity was not as easy as it sounds. Participating the design contest means I needed to refine every detail of the user journey to compete with enterprise candidates, but before that, what was the journey? It was too broad. If I defined the use case to be any time when a person meets a display, I would be a scope creep. To make it more specific, I pivoted it into workout assistance, where people could use UbiDisplay the most and don't really worry about privacy matters (fitness data would be the only data type shown public). There were three areas of this design that were refined: mobile UI, display UI, and a video that could illustrate the entire user journey.

Mobile UI

Mobile UI adopted the layout of the initial design concept, meaning I wanted to keep it simple. The worst scenario is that users spend too much time setting up the app instead of actually working out. Therefore, the app only had two main pages: presets and settings.

• Presets: it's also the main page of the app. Users can simply click on a preset and start exercising.

• Settings: it's the page to make presets. Users can customize what type of data to be shown on the UbiDisplay. They can check the data type and (sometimes) select their prefered unit. That's it!

Display UI

The color scheme was designed to be a gradient between yellow and red, mostly orange, providing a sporty feeling. When designing the display UI, I had two top priorities on mind: simple and dynamic.

• Simple: runners and cyclists shouldn't spend more than 5 seconds staring at the display, or the purpose of the external display will be defeated. The goal is always to provide users with their fitness data without distracting them.

• Dynamic: UbiDisplay should catch users' attention fast so that they won't miss those displays while running or cycling.

As a result, I decided that it was the time to practice my motion graphic skills.

Final Illustration

The following illustrations are the summary of UbiDisplay, a communication system between user's smartphone and nearby displays to represent personalized data. It address the problem of inefficiency of digital displays in public spaces to make them more engaging. Under the concept of ubiquitous computing, everything is a computing device and can be used by people nearby. This design project examines one specific use case, exercising, to explore possibilities in shared spaces.

Challenges

Ubiquitous computing is still a relatively new concept and takes efforts to run properly. UbiDisplay is facing the following challenges that needs to be confronted for future development.

Compatibility

One of the challenges is compatibility. Since the UbiDisplay is trying to unite all public displays, to create a system compatible various display standard is a tough mission. The first problem is that different displays have different resolutions and dimensions; to keep the same content properly shown in different screen is a problem that needs to be tackled. Another compatibility challenge is that there needs to be a piece of software installed in all computers behind third party monitors. There might be barriers when persuading owners of those public screens to install the software that has a potential to harm their profit.

Cost

If UbiDisplay is to be free, the income from commercial might be too thin to cover the manufacturing cost; therefore. Traditional public services are able to charge users, such as transportation services. On the contrary, UbiDisplay is a new concept to its target users; it has to reduce the gap between its services and its customers, thus persuading them to pay for it. Lancaster University e-Campus project learned several lessons after the deployment, and the first lesson is “Deployments are costly” and researchers were “surprised by the sheer volume of work involved in creating the deployments” (Storz, 2006). If a university-wide deployment can be that costly, then the city wide deployment can be significantly expensive.

Privacy

In a recent article An architecture for privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing, Jason Hong claimed that “Developers currently have little support in designing software architectures and in creating interactions that are effective in helping end-users manage their privacy” (Hong, 2004). For the UbiDisplay, although the design utilizes Bluetooth technology without involving the Internet or any kind of data collection mechanism to locally transfer user’s data to nearby displays, persuading users that this technology is not an invasion of their privacy can still be challenging. Moreover, even though the system does not collect personal data itself, users are still at risk that their information might be visible to other people within the same service. To address this problem, highly customizable software is needed so that the user can edit what information they do not want to show on the public displays.

Reference

1. Terry Winograd. “From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design.” Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing. Springer-Verlag. 1997, 149-162.

2. Erickson, Thomas, and Wendy A. Kellogg. “Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes.” ACM transactions on computer-human interaction (TOCHI) 7.1 (2000): 59-83.

3. Hollan, Jim, and Scott Stornetta. “Beyond being there.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1992.

4. Hong, Jason I., and James A. Landay. “An architecture for privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing.” Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services. ACM, 2004.

5. Storz, Oliver, et al. “Public ubiquitous computing systems: Lessons from the e-campus display deployments.” Pervasive Computing, IEEE 5.3 (2006): 40-47.

6. Tweeddale, Brynn, Hua Fan, and Kiwon Jeong. Drawlink: Public Art for the Link Light Rail. Web, 2016. Retrieved from: https://drawlink.wordpress.com/research/

7. Rhodes, Bradley J., Nelson Minar, and Josh Weaver. “Wearable computing meets ubiquitous computing: Reaping the best of both worlds.” Wearable Computers, 1999. Digest of Papers. The Third International Symposium on. IEEE, 1999.

Design material credits

1. Photo of cycling person: Cycling weekly. Retrieved from: http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/fitness/training/13-ways-increase-average-cycling-speed-144937

2. Calories tracking image: TechAdvisor. Retrieved from: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/feature/wearable-tech/fitbit-trackers-vs-apple-watch-3612954/

3. Billboard: Rotating billboard. Retrieved from: https://codepen.io/GretelE/pen/EyzGC

4. Map: iPhone Hacks. Retrieved from: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/12/google-maps-lane-guidance-for-drivers-in-europe.html

5. Station display: Gizmag. Retrieved from: http://www.gizmag.com/nyc-subway-touch-screen-kiosks/26751/

Other contributors:

• Part 1: Individual

• Part 2: Mingxiao Hu

• Part 3: Violet Xinyi Guo, Sheen Shenhui Jia, Hongyu Chen