Designing the spectator experience

By Stuart Reeves, Steve Benford, Claire O'Malley, Mike C. Fraser. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2005

496 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Interaction is increasingly a public affair, taking place in our theatres, galleries, museums, exhibitions and on the city streets. This raises a new design challenge for HCI - how should spectators experience a performer's interaction with a computer? We classify public interfaces (including examples from art, performance and exhibition design) according to the extent to which a performer's manipulations of an interface and their resulting effects are hidden, partially revealed, fully revealed or even amplified for spectators. Our taxonomy uncovers four broad design strategies: 'secretive,' where manipulations and effects are largely hidden; 'expressive,' where they tend to be revealed enabling the spectator to fully appreciate the performer's interaction; 'magical,' where effects are revealed but the manipulations that caused them are hidden; and finally 'suspenseful,' where manipulations are apparent but effects are only revealed as the spectator takes their turn.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/647db5f12bead68c08bed1750f4196320e497290

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Human-Computer Interaction

Citations in the corpus

"Alone together?": exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games (2006, unknown): “a set of guidelines to “design for the spectator experience” [15].”
Usable gestures for mobile interfaces: evaluating social acceptability (2010, background): “These kinds of interactions take place in public locations, and must be designed to account for the presence of spectators [14].”
Looking glass: a field study on noticing interactivity of a shop window (2012, background): “We found that people passing by firstly observed somebody making unconventional movements while looking into a shop window (the manipulation [23]).”
Staying open to interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation (2006, background): “The second is recent interest in HCI in drawing on the arts and humanities [e.g. 11,12,14,16,23,26,28,35,39] whose perspectives assume a rich field of interpretation going beyond HCI’s traditional preoccupations with utility and usability.”
Designing sports: a framework for exertion games (2011, background): “The advantage of introducing computers to this bodily struggle is that digital technology can selectively hide bodily information from players as well as reveal it [44, 45] so that the player can then benefit from both increased and decreased awareness of their exertion.”