Experiences of supporting local and remote mobile phone interaction in situated public display deployments

Public displays and mobile phones are ubiquitous technologies that are already weaving themselves into the everyday life of urban citizens. The combination of the two enables new and novel possibilities, such as interaction with displays that are not physically accessible, extending screen real estate for mobile phones or transferring user content to and from public displays. However, current usability evaluations of prototype systems have explored only a small part of this design space, as usage of such systems is deeply embedded in and dependent on social and everyday context. In order to investigate issues surrounding appropriation and real use in social context field studies are necessary. In this paper we present our experiences with field deployments in a continuum between exploratory prototypes and technology probes. We present benefits and drawbacks of different evaluation methods, and provide a number of validated lessons from our deployments.