Workshop 7 – Screening Urban Spaces

Designing the Urban User Experience

Screens have become a ubiquitous feature of urban public and semi-public spaces. We find them in various types and sizes in places like train stations, public squares, pubs, cinemas, university campuses, to name but a few. This ubiquitous presence of screens has led to a phenomenon that was described as ‘display blindness’. The increasing amount of digital content available around us if often considered as information pollution. Yet, urban screens offer an opportunity to increase the experience of public and semi-public places. Key aspects towards designing more engaging and relevant screens are a careful consideration of context and content, but also the ability to allow individuals to interact with such screens. This workshop is a forum for discussion of aspects around the design of urban screens and user interactions in urban spaces that involve screens.

Topics addressed in this workshop include, but are not limited to:
- Techniques for interacting with media facades
- Crowd-based sensing and interaction in public environments
- Cross-screen interaction
- Interaction design and urban spaces
- Designing for engaging user interaction

Host:
Martin Tomitsch – The University of Sydney

Martin Tomitsch – Biography
Martin Tomitsch is a lecturer at the Design Lab, an interdisciplinary research group within the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. He is founding member of the Media Architecture Institute and one of the curators of the Media Architecture Biennale. He has a background in informatics with a focus on interaction design. His research involves the design of interactive experiences and the exploration of new forms of interaction to elicit user engagement and social interaction in everyday environments.