Interactive Public Digital Displays: Investigating Its Use in a High School Context

This paper presents a longitudinal user study that investigated the adoption of some Bluetooth based functionalities for a public digital display in a high school. More specifically, the utilization of Bluetooth device naming extended beyond social identity representation and introduced the use of a simple interaction mechanism. The interaction mechanism involves recognizing parts of the Bluetooth device name as explicit instructions to trigger the generation of content on an interactive public display. Together with representatives of the teachers' community, the design team defined some social rules concerning usage in order to account for the specificities of the place. In the user study, three fully functional prototypes were deployed at the school hall of the high school. The functionalities introduced with the different prototypes were: the visualization on the display of the Bluetooth device names, the possibility to contribute to tag clouds and the possibility to choose icons from a given set for self-expression. The results suggest that people appropriated some but not all of the functionalities employed. Implications of our findings to the design of interactive digital displays are pointed out.