Who cares about the Content? An Analysis of Playful Behaviour at a Public Display

In this paper, we report on a field deployment study of a public interactive display, in which we observed a surprising number of interactions that seemed to be more concerned about playing 'with' the display rather than exploring its content. The display featured information about events at a nearby theatre and activities at the university, and supported four basic gestures for navigating through the content. To indicate its interactive capabilities, the display represented passers-by as a mirror image in the form of a skeleton. Our analysis of depth video recordings suggests that this representation may have triggered some of the playful behaviour we observed in the deployment study. To better understand how and when people engaged in playful behaviours, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the 40 recordings of longest duration. These had a total of 102 people recorded over an 8-day period. We discuss our observations in the context of performative aspects of human actions in public space, and how they can be fed back into the design of gesture interfaces for public displays.