ELSI Model: Bridging User Engagement around Interactive Public Displays and Media Facades in Urban Spaces

Abstract

With recent technological advancements and significant price drops of display technologies interactive digital displays rapidly find their way into urban environments. Researchers have been modeling coordination and engagement around displays, either around (1) small-scale situated displays or (2) large-scale urban screens such as media facades. To this day, the two are considered as different domains. In this paper we take a first step towards bridging the gap between both types of displays by deriving a general, dynamic model we call elastic space-interaction (ELSI) model of user engagement around interactive public displays and media facades. The ELSI model provides a common terminology for describing engagement around interactive displays and media facades, improves compatibility across studies, and points out how to observe changes in user coordination and engagement introduced by different screen sizes and interaction techniques.