Creating Ambient Visualisations using Extreme Prototyping

In this paper we report on an exciting exploratory experiment that lead to a number of ambient visualisations of passively sensed human activity. Ambient displays offer those around some sense of activity or information without explicitly focusing on the display itself. We present a number of radically different visualisations using forms of situated display or installation. Each tries to give a sense of current human activity in other places or past human presence in the same place. These visualisations were produced during a series of one-day design and build exercises based on various existing hardware and software components. This form of 'extreme' prototyping means that we have visualisations covering a broad range of the design space and so can explore various attributes of this design space. The restricted design regime also promotes innovative and creative solutions – rigid constraints seem to lead to serendipitous discoveries.