The Environment of Plymouth's Train Station

A very badly drawn map of Plymouth train station.

The environment of the Plymouth train station is a busy one - people move in different directions, and sometimes with cumbersome luggage. It is an area where one must be mindful of others, as the area is small and confined and usually packed with people who are in a hurry.

To the left of the entrance there is an electronic ticket machine, and a traditional ticket office. Most people, including myself, usually go straight to the machine. The machines are useful if you are in a hurry and there is a queue for the main booth, but they are also the only place where you can collect pre-paid tickets - there are often queues for the machines as well as the booth, possibly for this reason.

Opposite the main entrance, there is a WH Smiths, and to the shops right, the barriers to the platforms. On the right of the entrance, there is a small waiting area with seats, and to the front of that area (adjacent to the ticket barriers) there is a Spar.

In front of the seating area and Spar, there are a couple of monitors displaying train information. I found these hard to read, and there were always people crowded around them.

This area of the station is somewhat circular - wherever you stand, you can see the other main attractions (seating, Spar, WH Smiths, Ticket offices, and exit). The main source of natural daylight comes from the entrance, which is mostly large glass doors and windows. The room is fairly light, which may cause trouble with projection equipment.


The area goes between being fairly quiet, and extremely busy and noisy.

This image is of the ceiling of the train station. This is the area where the dome would be.

Throughout this post I have used photographs that Dale and Euan took, which can be found on
Flickr, uploaded by Beth.

Thoughts

I've been thinking about what I want my site to look like, and I've come up with a very basic and unoriginal layout. It's totally uninspired, but I drew it up while sitting in Primark, so maybe something better will come to me when I'm somewhere a bit more inspiring.

 

I've been on the lookout for any interactive displays at train stations and the like, but the best I have seen was a large video screen with advertisements playing. Maybe it's time to look somewhere else for ideas...

I need to be in a good mood to create anything decent. :c

Academic Papers and Articles Relating to Interactive Public Displays

Finke, M. et al., 2006. Lessons Learned : Game Design for Large Public Displays. Computing.

This paper looks at the design and deployment of an interactive game for a large public display. There is an interesting diagram which may be of use included in this paper.

The diagram shoes the 'flow' of users when interacting with a public display - it's an interesting observation. The 'actors' are those that are actively interacting with the display - controlling it or engaged with it. The 'spectators' are observing the display and mentally engaged with the content, but are not as active as the 'actors'. The 'bystanders' are people that are not really observing the display at all.

Kaviani, N. et al., 2009. What goes where ? Designing interactive large public display applications for mobile device interaction. Strategies, pp.129-138.

This paper provides a good idea and describes well the way people interact with displays when in large numbers, going into more detail about the above diagrams idea.

Vahey, P., Roschelle, J. & Tatar, D., 2007. Using handhelds to link private cognition and public interaction. In Educational Technology. p. 13–16. Available at: http://asianvu.com/bookstoread/etp/Educational_Technology_May_June_2007.pdf.

Vogel, D. & Balakrishnan, R., 2004. Interactive Public Ambient Displays : Transitioning from Implicit to Explicit , Public to Personal , Interaction with Multiple Users. Work, 6(2), pp.137-146.

Wichary, M. et al., 2005. Vista : Interactive Coffee-Corner Display. Design, pp.1062-1077.

Creating an Interactive Space

The full brief for this project is readable here.

In your teams, you are to plan and design an interactive installation for use in a highly social "playful" space. You installation should encompass some form of media (of your choice), combined with an appropriate mechanism to allow participants to interact with it. Your installation should encourage engagement of the audience within the space and integrate with or even support the activities that take place within the space. You should avoid a purely functional purpose and strive to produce a piece of work that provides users with an aesthetic, conceptual or sensorial experience.

Choosing your space

You should attempt to target a technology-literate audience, in order to maximize the likelihood of successfully engaging participants. Equally, targeting a space where audience members dwell for some time will increase the opportunity for interaction. You should bear in mind that you will need access to the space for the purposes of surveying and observation. You will not however need to gain permission to actually install the work as the focus of this module is design and planning, rather than actual realisation. It is up to you which space you choose for your work, however a few good examples include night clubs, cafes/bars, shopping mall, "lunchtime" gardens, bus/rail stations. The space to be chosen should be negotiated with the lecturers on the module.

Outputs

Due to the limited time available, you will not have to actually produce a complete and working final product (other modules will focus upon hands-on practical production skills). The emphasis of this project is more upon the analysis, design and planning of production, your aim being to document the whole lifecycle of the project. You should first identify a concrete set of requirements that you will derived from the brief. You should also carefully research the background to the brief with respect to other technological and artistic work in the area. The next step will be to survey and observe the environment and the context you have selected. Following this, a deployment and operation plan should be produced. Finally you should provide a description of how you would go about critically reflecting on the experience of the installation in use (including outlining protocols, designing questionnaires, defining success criteria etc). You will be guided through each of these stages over the duration of the module.

As a group, we came up with quite a large list of possible locations. My contributions were the Starbucks cafe located at the lower end of the city centre, and the bridge that you have to cross to gain access to the National Marine Aquarium.

I thought of Starbucks initially as I have sat upstairs there many times before. The area is fairly open, and depending on the time of day, quite busy or fairly quiet. I thought it would be a good area for an installation as it is away from the main serving area of the cafe so wouldn't get in the way of people that were in a hurry or queuing for a drink, and the upstairs area is generally where people that wish to take their time go. The people upstairs would possibly be there to socialise, or to take some quiet time away from work, so they may be open to something interactive to engage with. The people here would generally be technology aware - many of them bring their laptops and netbooks to browse the internet - so open to a technology based interactive display.

For the bridge, I thought of how when I went to the Aquarium I had to wait for a few minutes for the bridge to raise and go back down to let a boat pass. As most people who cross that bridge would be going to the Aquarium, I thought this would be a good place to install something. The people going to the Aquarium would most likely be in a good mood for interacting, and may have curious children with them who would enjoy an interactive display while they waited for the bridge to raise and lower.