TY - JOUR

T1 - On the role of digital consultation tools in public space design

T2 - a case study

AU - Simm, Will

AU - Ferrario, Maria-Angela

AU - Whittle, Jon

AU - Davenport, Ryan

AU - Binner, Jane

AU - Frankova, Katerina

AU - Garton, Laurence

AU - Woodcock, Andrée

AU - Lam, Busayawan

AU - Lawlor-Wright, Therese

PY - 2016/5

Y1 - 2016/5

N2 - Organizations increasingly rely on digital tools, such as social media, to harvest public opinion on a variety of issues ranging from brand reputations to political debates. One area in which digital tools have great potential is in consultation on design of public spaces. Public organizations are expected to consult with users of a public space before, during and after occupancy. Digital tools could increase the effectiveness of this consultation because: (i) they are available 24 h and do not rely on the presence of researchers and (ii) data are collected and analysed using automated methods, allowing faster decision-making. Despite these potential advantages, little is understood about how digital and non-digital consultations compare in practice. This paper reports on a live trial with a prototype digital consultation tool called VoiceYourView, which was co-designed with stakeholders and used to canvass opinion on the refurbishment of a major metropolitan library. Over 6 weeks, we used a variety of methods to collect comment from 600 users. VoiceYourView solicits opinion in unprompted form—it does not ask specific questions as in a survey—so users can say anything they like at any time. VoiceYourView carries out real-time analysis of data collected and uses public display screens to summarize comments-to-date in situ. Our research methods focused on observational studies conducted ‘in the wild’: this allowed us to capture user interactions with VoiceYourView in a realistic setting. Our findings indicate that VoiceYourView encouraged more positive feedback than non-digital methods. We also find that positive comments in general contain less actionable information than negative comments, and unprompted comments have similar actionable content to prompted comments. We suggest that this pattern in soliciting more (traditionally difficult to obtain) positive comments with VoiceYourView versus traditional survey methods implies that digital consultation tools of this type can complement existing channels.

AB - Organizations increasingly rely on digital tools, such as social media, to harvest public opinion on a variety of issues ranging from brand reputations to political debates. One area in which digital tools have great potential is in consultation on design of public spaces. Public organizations are expected to consult with users of a public space before, during and after occupancy. Digital tools could increase the effectiveness of this consultation because: (i) they are available 24 h and do not rely on the presence of researchers and (ii) data are collected and analysed using automated methods, allowing faster decision-making. Despite these potential advantages, little is understood about how digital and non-digital consultations compare in practice. This paper reports on a live trial with a prototype digital consultation tool called VoiceYourView, which was co-designed with stakeholders and used to canvass opinion on the refurbishment of a major metropolitan library. Over 6 weeks, we used a variety of methods to collect comment from 600 users. VoiceYourView solicits opinion in unprompted form—it does not ask specific questions as in a survey—so users can say anything they like at any time. VoiceYourView carries out real-time analysis of data collected and uses public display screens to summarize comments-to-date in situ. Our research methods focused on observational studies conducted ‘in the wild’: this allowed us to capture user interactions with VoiceYourView in a realistic setting. Our findings indicate that VoiceYourView encouraged more positive feedback than non-digital methods. We also find that positive comments in general contain less actionable information than negative comments, and unprompted comments have similar actionable content to prompted comments. We suggest that this pattern in soliciting more (traditionally difficult to obtain) positive comments with VoiceYourView versus traditional survey methods implies that digital consultation tools of this type can complement existing channels.

KW - human-computer interaction

KW - interaction design

KW - collaborative and social computing

KW - ubiquitous and mobile computing

KW - visualization

KW - speech based

U2 - 10.1093/iwc/iwu042

DO - 10.1093/iwc/iwu042

M3 - Journal article

VL - 28

SP - 273

EP - 292

JO - Interacting with Computers

JF - Interacting with Computers

SN - 0953-5438

IS - 3

ER -