Life through the lens: a qualitative investigation of human behaviour with an urban photography service

2015. Simo Hosio, Richard Harper, Kenton O'Hara, Jorge Goncalves & Vassilis Kostakos
Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference.

Abstract

The proliferation of computation in our everyday environment enables new types of interaction and communication devices. Understanding the dialogue between users and such technology is crucial to the success of future urban computing deployments. We investigate human behaviour in public spaces using a public photography service deployed on interactive public displays in an urban city. Through the analysis of user-generated snapshots we show that the service was rapidly appropriated outside its intended purpose, resulting in use that differs substantially from those previously documented in photography literature. We reflect on the reasons why the service was appropriated in this way and explore the evolution of photography in urban contexts. Ultimately, our findings help ground our understanding of human behaviour in urban spaces and thus contribute to the design of future Ubicomp deployments.

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Citation

Hosio, S., Harper, R., O'Hara, K., Goncalves, J., & Kostakos, V. (2015). Life through the lens: a qualitative investigation of human behaviour with an urban photography service. Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference (pp. 157–164). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2783446.2783577, doi:10.1145/2783446.2783577

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/2783446.2783577,
author = {Hosio, Simo and Harper, Richard and O'Hara, Kenton and Goncalves, Jorge and Kostakos, Vassilis},
title = {Life through the lens: a qualitative investigation of human behaviour with an urban photography service},
year = {2015},
isbn = {9781450336437},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2783446.2783577},
doi = {10.1145/2783446.2783577},
abstract = {The proliferation of computation in our everyday environment enables new types of interaction and communication devices. Understanding the dialogue between users and such technology is crucial to the success of future urban computing deployments. We investigate human behaviour in public spaces using a public photography service deployed on interactive public displays in an urban city. Through the analysis of user-generated snapshots we show that the service was rapidly appropriated outside its intended purpose, resulting in use that differs substantially from those previously documented in photography literature. We reflect on the reasons why the service was appropriated in this way and explore the evolution of photography in urban contexts. Ultimately, our findings help ground our understanding of human behaviour in urban spaces and thus contribute to the design of future Ubicomp deployments.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference},
pages = {157–164},
numpages = {8},
keywords = {field trial, human behaviour, photography, public displays, public spaces},
location = {Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom},
series = {British HCI '15}
}