Guiding Design for Waiting

Abstract

This chapter presents a number of suggestions for design of information technology (IT) to be used in public places. The design implications given are based on an exploratory field study conducted in public places where people wait to travel. The study shows that the use of technology must be negotiable and adaptable to support use in different ways, in different contexts and to produce a possibility for others to understand this use. The findings are arranged in three areas: creating privacy (how people act to establish privacy in the public place), adapting to change (how people adapt to social, spatial and temporal changes in the environment), and appearance and activity (how people make efforts to communicate activities to others present in the public place). Each of these areas has aspects that affect the use of IT. Thus they should also influence the design of IT. Based on these findings, we derive implications for design of IT to be used in public places.