A Critical Review of how Public Display Interfaces Facilitate

Placemaking
Paul Biedermann Andrew Vande Moere
paul.biedermann@kuleuven.be andrew.vandemoere@kuleuven.be
Research[x]Design - KU Leuven Research[x]Design - KU Leuven
Leuven, Belgium Leuven, Belgium

73 52 47 45 28 28 60 52 52 38

75 79 22 27 77 59 4 16 35 14

7 39 71 44 74 13 67 39 63 29

58 12 5 23 72 70 40 55 8 6

Figure 1: An overview of the 40 placemaking interfaces that were analysed in this review. The red annotations are story-based
interfaces; green are polling-based; and blue are data-based. Note that each numerical annotation corresponds to its academic
reference, and that the copyright of each image belongs to the respective authors of the corresponding publication.
ABSTRACT hierachical dependencies between stakeholders; make use of certain
Although public interfaces are promised to facilitate placemaking technological means that limit citizen agency; and are controlled
by offering a technological platform between citizens and decision by gatekeepers who operate covertly and without accountability.
makers, little is known about whether they actually bring these Based on these findings, we propose five "middle-out" considera-
stakeholders closer together towards local transformative change. tions that inform how the next generation of placemaking interfaces
By systematically analysing the infrastructural concepts, methods can facilitate more meaningful and democratic bilateral dialogues
and tools of 40 interface deployments, this review presents a rela- between citizens and decision makers.
tional model that describes how a public interface can afford the
communication, reflection or inquiry of civic feedback. Our analysis CCS CONCEPTS
also reveals how most public interfaces: are based on utilitarian • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile comput-
motives rather than facilitating placemaking; provoke dialogues ing theory, concepts and paradigms; Interaction design theory,
among citizens instead of between stakeholders; fail to upend the concepts and paradigms; User models.

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https://doi.org/10.1145/3469410.3469427
KEYWORDS
Placemaking, citizen participation, public interfaces, public displays,
urban interaction
ACM Reference Format:
Paul Biedermann and Andrew Vande Moere. 2021. A Critical Review of how
Public Display Interfaces Facilitate Placemaking. In Media Architecture Bien-
nale 20 (MAB20), June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands.
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3469410.3469427

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MAB20, June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands
1 INTRODUCTION
Placemaking describes the philosophy and the practical process of
reshaping a neighborhood, city or region with the aim to establish a
sense of place within a community [63]. This sense of place is often
created by setting up a dialogic platform [67] between community
members and decision makers so that all stakeholders can form
and then share their own narratives about the place in question.
By revealing the polyphonic (i.e. many-voiced) nature of the result-
ing community narrative, the often perceived unanimity behind
the official plans for future actions can be broken, and the seeds
for alternative actions be planted. However, the widespread and
inclusive use of a placemaking platform is faced with a wide range
of challenges, as not all citizens have a meaningful opportunity to
take part. Participation at on-site meetings or workshops can be
biased because citizens self-select whether to attend these or not
[59], which favors those people who are educated (social bias), have
free time (availability bias) or have a great interest in the issues
at stake (preference bias). Moreover, community gatherings can
become restricted due to urgent public health concerns, such as in
regards to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Public interfaces, i.e. interactive devices that are physically sit-
uated within public space, are promised to solve many of these
concerns because they set up a voluntary and opportunistic di-
alogic platform via a questionnaire, voting options, or brief text
entries on an easily approachable, safe and informal interaction
medium, such as a touch-enabled display, tangible user interface or
prototyping booth. Sometimes described as social IoT [42], tactical
[61], pop-up [26] or DIY-urbanism [29] interventions, these public
interfaces all share one common goal, i.e. to instigate a platform
for dialogue at the relevant physical ’place’ that requires some kind
of community ’making’. In this study, all these public interface
concepts are merged into the more open-ended term ‘placemaking
interface’ to denote a technological intervention that aims to afford
a physically-situated dialogue between citizens and decision mak-
ers towards local transformative change. This intended change can
range from making a community more aware of local issues [8]
or predominant values, beliefs and assumptions [23]; over empow-
ering a community to formulate and share its needs and desires
[34, 59, 66, 73]; to enabling a community to self-organise towards a
certain social change [30, 42].
Research endeavours in the field of Human-Computer Interac-
tion (HCI) on public interfaces initially focused on basic usability
issues, such as their vulnerability of being ignored due to expec-
tations of irrelevant content [52], their struggle to communicate
interactivity [55] and tendency to cause social embarrassment [3].
As a result, a multitude of guidelines has been proposed to tackle
these issues and enable passers-by to notice interactivity, such as by
incorporating on-screen reflections of themselves [50] or curiosity
objects [35]; support their understanding of how to interact (e.g.
by presenting gesture instructions in a dedicated section on the
interface [75] or using appropriate affordances [11]); and reduce
social embarrassment by balancing anonymity and social interest
[70] or enabling covert interaction [64]). Further efforts include de-
tailed models that provide insight into the spatial aspects of display
placement [21], their impact and value from a civic stakeholder
perspective [10], the role of the socio-economic context [49], social
171
P. Biedermann, A. Vande Moere
activation loops that promote audience engagement [77] and the
importance of aligning the content to the location and people [60]
and communities over time [56]. Next to these techno-centric in-
quiries, more theoretical discourses exist, such as how design might
contribute to the formation of publics [17, 40], how HCI informs
democratic decision making [53] or reflections on the role of the
researcher in public display deployments [36].
Despite this wide range of actionable insights, relatively little is
known about the actual value of a public interface in the dialogic
process of placemaking, i.e. whether and how it empowers the
different placemaking stakeholders, such as citizens and decision
makers to actually engage with each other. This study is based on
the belief that critically analysing this value requires exposing some
preconceived assumptions that ground many current placemaking
interface designs, such as about why a placemaking interface is
deployed; how citizens are called to action; how they can contribute;
which of the personal narratives are filtered out and fed back to
them; and ultimately, how the resulting community narrative is
used to influence the official narrative.
This review is based on the analysis of 36 academic publications
that together describe the deployment of 40 different placemaking
interface studies. By systematically identifying and grouping their
infrastructural concepts, methods and tools, we generated an en-
compassing placemaking interface dialog model that expresses how
a placemaking interface facilitates a dialogical platform between
stakeholders. We then distilled three distinct placemaking inter-
face typologies that differ by how they empower stakeholders to
shape a community narrative by the communication, reflection or
inquiry of community narratives. From these findings we discuss
five critical tendencies in the current practice of placemaking inter-
face research, ranging from primarily techno-centric motivations
over technological limitations, to the reaffirmation of hierarchical
stakeholder roles.
Inspired by the smart engagement framework of [24], we then
propose a set of "middle-out" considerations, which aim to enable
more inclusive and collaborative community engagement processes
by combining both top-down and bottom-up voices [19, 25]). The
placemaking interface dialog model, the three interface typologies
and the middle-out considerations can be used to make future public
interfaces more effective in targeting highly complex placemaking
challenges .
2 METHODOLOGY
Although we realise that it lacks true representative power [15],
we adopted a non-systematic narrative review methodology [20] to
ensure that our literature selection was more comprehensive and
open-ended in nature. The initial literature collection was seeded
by sourcing a small convenience sample of 10 peer-reviewed publi-
cations, which are marked with an asterisk in Table 1. Each selected
publication was required to transparently report on the design
or deployment of at least one digital or tangible interface located
in public space that allowed different stakeholders to initiate a
placemaking activity by creating or sharing narratives with one an-
other. This convenience sample was then broadened with 26 more
publications by querying keyword combinations such as “urban par-
ticipation”, “citizen participation”, “placemaking”, “public interface”
A Critical Review of how Public Display Interfaces Facilitate Placemaking
Table 1: Full overview of the reviewed works, including their technical components, participation themes, involved stakehold-
ers and interface typologies
and “public display”, and by scanning the reference lists of already
selected works. While most publications (22, N=36) originated from
academic venues related to human-computer interaction (e.g. CHI
and DIS), 14 were published in venues from alternative disciplines
such as participatory design (e.g. PD) or data visualisation (e.g.
TVCG and VISAP). As three publications reported on multiple im-
plementations, the final sample consists of 40 distinct placemaking
interfaces, all of which are illustrated in Figure 1.
2.1 Stakeholders
The collection of codes, summarised in Table 1, revealed that 19
(N=40) deployments explicitly involved specific decision makers,
i.e. external parties with a position of civic power, such as govern-
mental agencies or private companies, but also NGO’s and citizen
organisations. For instance, city councils used placemaking inter-
faces to gather ideas and opinions from visitors during public events
[28]; urban planning departments collected location-specific input
from citizens [59, 74]; local elected officials polled citizens about
administrative changes [66]; design agencies engaged citizens in
collaborative storytelling [58] and estate owners involved residents
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in building a more cohesive community [16]. Although these de-
cision makers seemed to co-determine or financially support the
overall placemaking context, they often did not actively take part
in the deployment of the interfaces. In contrast, 13 deployments
(N=40) received no direct support of a specific decision maker, and
instead seemed to be primarily driven by an academic research
agenda. For instance, researchers deployed a placemaking interface
in a university setting to study the impact of anonymity during
public polling [70] or means to engage citizens to participate and
provide content for public opinion polls in public space [62]. Al-
though these interfaces were not utilised to tackle a real-world
placemaking challenge, they still prompted citizens to engage with
themes that related to their community insofar that some social
debates occurred in their immediate vicinity.
The 40 deployments involved either researchers (36, N=40) or
design practitioners (4, N=40) who were responsible for designing,
deploying, managing and maintaining the placemaking interfaces.
We describe these stakeholders as gatekeepers, a term from social
science research that describes the individuals or collective who
control the access to resources and rewards that are relevant in a
MAB20, June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands
Figure 2: The call-to-actions (marked in red) are designed to
attract the attention of passers-by. They can be combined
with the interface itself (marked in green), such as in a)
Postervote [73] and b) Viewpoint [66], or be split-off in sep-
arate elements, as shown in c) Citizen Dialog Kit [12]. Note
that the copyright of each image belongs to the respective
authors of the corresponding publication.
social system [31]. More specialised gatekeeping activities included
co-authoring polling questions with decision makers [12, 59], edit-
ing audio-visual materials to engage observers in reflection [76] or
empowering citizens to create narratives [28], as well as moderat-
ing [34] or filtering [59] the contributed narrative into a cohesive
community narrative. Gatekeepers often collaborate with decision
makers [28, 59, 66] or citizens [14, 73, 78] to understand their in-
tentions and needs in order to create placemaking interventions
that are meaningful to them. Only four studies (i.e. [14, 34, 59, 66])
within our sample also attempted to allocate gatekeeping tasks to
stakeholders other than researchers and designers.
The prototypical ’end users’ who engaged with a placemaking
interface generally consist of citizens representing a community.
While some citizens only passively ’lurk’ to consume the display
content, others actively contribute with their personal narratives,
such as by submitting a piece of audiovisual material, or their voice
to an opinion poll. In online community research, the act of ‘lurking’
is attributed to personal, social or technical factors, such as the need
for gratification or time availability [1].
Citizens actively assisted with the deployment of a placemaking
interface in about 19 deployments (N=40), yet without having any
real control over it. These so-called supporters consist of trusted
neighbours who facilitated the game dynamics of a city interven-
tion [14] or who hosted the placemaking interfaces behind their
street-side windows [5, 78]; visual artists who chalked community
narratives on the street surface [38]; store owners who reported
on how citizens interacted with the placemaking interfaces in their
stores [38, 66]; volunteers who provided instructions to engage with
an interactive noticeboard [72]; and people who were invited to
participate in pilot-tests and in-the-wild evaluation studies [5, 7, 43].
2.2 Interface Components
In the next step, we analysed each publication’s textual and visual
explanations to dismantle the described placemaking interfaces
into similarly discernible technical elements (e.g. creation and feed-
back components, storages); the functionalities they afforded (e.g.
contributing or responding to narratives by casting a vote, creating
text or recording audio-visual material); and the dialogical relations
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P. Biedermann, A. Vande Moere
Figure 3: Placemaking interfaces deploy various types of
feedback components, ranging from "reverse graffiti" in a)
Staubmarke [54], over wall-sized split flap displays in b)
MyStoryG [37], to kiosks embedded into facades in c) Cap-
ture the Moment [46]. Note that the copyright of each image
belongs to the respective authors of the corresponding pub-
lication.
they created between the stakeholders (e.g. negotiating, inquiring
or moderating narratives). As shown in Figure 2, some placemaking
interfaces allowed citizens to submit narratives through a creation
component that is typically comprised of two parts: 1) a call-to-
action that invites citizens to actively engage via concrete informa-
tion, such as a polling question [12, 66], a data visualisation [5, 69]
or a graphical chart [7]; and 2) the interface itself, which hosts
interactive hardware features such as physical buttons [12, 66], a
keyboard [34, 37], a camera [34, 46, 46], or a microphone [28]. Other
creation components utilized pervasive technologies to outsource
the authoring to a personal computing device, such as via SMS [59],
social media [37] or a custom-made web form [27, 44]. Additionally,
some creation components make use of tangible props to trigger
more creative or complex types of personal narratives [28], such
as miniature-scale architectural models [74] or magnetic tokens of
words and geometrical shapes [72].
As shown in Figure 3, almost all placemaking interfaces con-
tain a feedback component that presents the personal narratives
back as a potential community narrative. Common feedback com-
ponents made use of digital media such as custom-made websites
[27], smartphone applications [51] as well as social media platforms
[34, 37, 59]. Other placemaking interfaces conveyed feedback in the
physical realm by using a digital display [28, 34, 59], written notes
on pre-fabricated cards [16], chalk graffiti [38], official signage [8],
verbal presentation [73] or a physicalisation [6, 57] to avoid that
citizens depend on a personal smartphone or remember a custom
entry point of participation (e.g. a URL) of a website. While most
creation and feedback components are integrated within a single
interface, they are detached into multiple separate booths or dis-
plays, particularly when the media type audio, video can generate
usability bottlenecks [28].
2.3 Data Components
As shown in Table 1, we coded three distinct ways of personal
narratives: data-based interfaces offer or gather quantitative data
from automated sensor measurements [39, 54, 71] or open data-
sets, such as demographics [6, 8]; polling-based interfaces offer
discrete opinion polls [12, 66]; and story-based interfaces facilitate
A Critical Review of how Public Display Interfaces Facilitate Placemaking MAB20, June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands

Figure 4: The placemaking interface dialog model. By placing decision makers at the top and citizens at the bottom, the result-
ing circular shape of the information flow expresses the intended dialogical platform of a placemaking process. The commu-
nity narrative that is created by aggregating multiple personal narratives from citizens informs decision makers and is then
fed back to the citizens in a continuous feedback loop.

the authoring of more complex types of content [16, 34, 37]. As these
narrative types are not mutually exclusive, we categorised each
interface by its stated primary aim even when its secondary features
might overlap another narrative type. For instance, a "story" can
also emerge when citizens come together to debate over displayed
demographic data [8]; and a data-based interface can still offer
some polling functionalities to capture the reactions of passers-
by [5]. Dedicated storages accumulate all the personal narratives
either digitally in the form of a database on-site [12, 78] or on
a remote, wirelessly networked machine [27, 51]; directly on the
physical creation interface, such as photos and letters collected in
a tangible probe-kit [16] or attached magnets and hand-written
notes on a public notice board [72], or via a co-designed tangible
prototype [4]. Before these personal narratives are fed back to the
citizens, they need to be filtered as to prevent offensive or off-topic
submissions to become broadcasted. This filtering is usually carried
out manually by gatekeepers [59] or decision makers [34], yet can
also be automated by filtering algorithms [44] or outsourced to
social media platforms like Twitter [37] as these already integrate
powerful censoring functionalities.
3 PLACEMAKING INTERFACE DIALOG
MODEL
By systematically overlapping each reviewed placemaking inter-
face in terms of its stakeholders and components, a general model
(Figure 4) emerged from the relationships between them. As shown
in Figure 5, this model also reveals three different ways of how
placemaking interfaces allow or resist citizens to actively influence
their dialogue with decision makers.
3.1 Reflection Interface
As shown in Figure 5a, a reflection interface (13, N=40) facilitates
placemaking primarily through a ‘top-down’ approach, in which the
community narrative that was chosen by the decision makers and/or
gatekeepers is presented to the citizens, much like public advertising
functions. The placemaking scope is thus limited to triggering

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MAB20, June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands P. Biedermann, A. Vande Moere

Figure 5: Three typologies can be derived from the placemaking interface dialog model: A) A reflection interface enables deci-
sion makers to display community narratives to citizens. While citizens can debate amongst each other, they have no agency
to contribute a personal narrative, or influence what community narrative is shown. B) A communication interface enables
citizens to engage with a community narrative one-directionally, by reflecting on the personal narratives provided by others
(basic model) or bi-directionally, by also contributing their personal narratives in response to the emerging community narra-
tive (including the dashed lines). C) An inquiry interface affords ’official’ inquiries that allow decision makers or gatekeepers
to inquire for citizens personal narratives (basic model) as well as more ’open’ inquiries that include also citizens in creating
the call-to-action (including the dashed lines).

a debate regarding local concerns among the spectators of the
interface, such as to inform citizens about environmental [23, 54]
or demographic [8, 38] issues. The main quality of a reflection
interface is that it reaches citizens opportunistically, by conveying
a single narrative in a voluntary and easily accessible way. Due to
its passive nature, a reflection interface thus acknowledges a latent
narrative much like how a community message board or bicycle
counter publicly reveal a shared interest or behavior.
Agency: As reflection interfaces only allow citizens to consume
but not to contribute or respond to the displayed narrative, their
actual reflections cannot be captured and fed back to the community.
Citizens can thus only raise their opinions within a limited scope,
such as to their friends or family [8], with strangers who are present
at the same time [38], or during on-site conversations or follow-up
interviews with decision makers or gatekeepers [23, 38].
3.2 Communication Interface
Figure 5b illustrates how a communication interface (14, N=40)
facilitates placemaking by empowering citizens to exchange per-
sonal narratives with one another. These personal narratives often
consist of a message, idea or concern that is directly related to
the surrounding space, such as local urban-planning needs [59]
or the experience of living in a deprived neighbourhood [16]; is
situated within a broader societal theme, such as sustainability [28]
or refugee asylum [76]; or remains entirely free and open to choose
[22, 27, 37, 72]. Because the narrative must be generated via a cre-
ation component, a communication interface either makes use of
an existing infrastructure, such as a permanently installed public
display [44, 59], or temporary means like location-based QR codes
[27] or lightweight public noticeboards [72].
Agency: Six (N=14) communication interfaces allowed a one-
directional dialog, such as displaying citizen-created snapshots
[46], fictional stories [37, 58], or personal statements [78] to other
citizens, who yet could not react to them. The remaining eight
interfaces (N=14) enabled a bi-directional dialogue as they allowed
citizens to react upon the personal narratives of other citizens,
such as via writing textual messages that are shown on the same
public display [59] or by engaging with previous statements via an
interactive projection [28].
Some of the 12 communication interfaces (N=14) that allowed
citizens to anonymously create personal narratives, filtered out
offensive submissions either via algorithms [44] or manually [59].
However, most (8, N=14) communication interfaces do not use
filtering because gatekeepers observed the creation of personal
narratives on-site [72, 74]; the interaction medium only provided a
pre-selection of words to formulate a narrative [28]; or because the
provenance was immediately obvious to others (e.g. the household
physically hosting a display [78]). Notably, 3 (N=14) deployments
deliberately allowed anonymous submissions without filtering [27,
37, 51].
3.3 Inquiry Interface
As shown in Figure 5c, an inquiry interface (25, N=40) is charac-
terised by how decision makers request feedback from citizens in
either a top-down and bottom-up direction. An inquiry interface
is generally used to support civic consultation, such as to source
urban planning ideas [59, 74], gather local sentiments regarding an
administrative intervention [66], a mobility plan [73], or a climate-
positive action [28]. It is expected that an inquiry interface is able
to engage a more representative sample of citizens, including peo-
ple who do not tend to take part in public debate, like the youth
[34], time-poor or impassive [59], or marginalised groups [66]. In
contrast to the other categories, the personal narratives resulting
from an inquiry interface typically respond to a predefined theme,
such as urban planning [74] or the experience of living in a housing
estate [16], that is framed by a given call-to-action.

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A Critical Review of how Public Display Interfaces Facilitate Placemaking
Agency:
The call-to-action can be determined as an official inquiry (18,
N=25), i.e. by selected individuals such as city councils [28, 66]
or urban planners [59]. In contrast, an open inquiry (7, N=25)
can be also determined by citizens through a dedicated creation
component, such as a web-form [14] or a smartphone app [51].
Placemaking interfaces that require citizens to negotiate about the
call-to-action with a gatekeeper [66, 73], such as when researchers
collaborate with specific citizen groups [5, 12, 38], are categorised
as both ’official’ and ’open’ in Table 1.
Our review shows that inquiry interfaces often target relatively
shallow placemaking themes, leading to open-ended questions like
“What is the dirtiest spot in your neighbourhood?” [14] or ”How
busy is this place at the moment?” [13]. This shallowness is possibly
caused by the fear from the initiators of the placemaking (often
researchers, see section 4.1) that citizens would expect that the
resulting community narrative will have an immediate impact on
the official decision-making.
4 DISCUSSION
Based on these findings, we discuss five critical tendencies within
the current practice of placemaking interfaces, arranged by the
typical chronological order of their deployment. Each tendency is
accompanied by several ‘middle out’ considerations, i.e. concrete
suggestions that future public interfaces should incorporate to make
sure that both decision makers and citizens are actively involved
in their deployment [25]. At the end, the potential scope of the
tendencies is generalised within the limitations and shortcomings
of our model.
4.1 How Placemaking Interfaces are Initiated
The majority of public placemaking interfaces are initiated by utili-
tarian motives, rather than to facilitate placemaking in and by itself.
We recognised this utilitarian motive via three distinct indicators:
The gatekeeper is external. As Table 1 demonstrates, most
gatekeepers were academic researchers (36, N=40) who are moti-
vated by aims that are external to placemaking. Instead of insti-
gating community engagement to inform real change, these re-
searchers rather sought to evaluate a conceptual or technological
public interface innovation in an ecologically valid setting. While
this concern can be explained by how our literature sample predom-
inantly originates from technology-driven research domains, we
however discovered only five interface deployments (i.e.[28, 51, 58])
in which non-research stakeholders were involved in the gatekeep-
ing, all of which were comprised of professional designers.
The placemaking context is artificial. Table 1 details how
13 (N=40) deployments did not report on the presence of a deci-
sion maker. Of those that described an involved decision maker,
few reported on their active participation, such as to co-determine
the actual placemaking theme, the call-to-actions, the gatekeeping
actions, and so on. As a result, many studies avoided more challeng-
ing placemaking contexts and instead intervened at sites within or
close to a university [34, 70], during (semi-) public events [28, 58]
or at more controlled settings, such as in citizen’s homes within an
established community [16]. This concern might be best explained
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MAB20, June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands
by a perceived lack of interested decision makers, the efforts re-
quired to get them invested, or the risks involved in deploying a
fragile, experimental interface in a more challenging placemaking
situation. For instance, a placemaking interface tends to require
physical access to energy infrastructure [45], and is best located
within a socially predictable and low-vandalism setting [2] that
is frequented by citizens with a single predominant language and
advanced digital media literacy skills. This tendency might also be
the result of how researchers try to control their in-the-wild place-
making context to limit external causal factors, and to ensure that
a similar placemaking interface will perform similarly in another,
yet reproducible, context.
No evidence is reported on placemaking impact. Few pub-
lications presented empirical evidence of the actual impact their
public interfaces had created on the placemaking process, beyond
how and why citizens interacted with the interface itself. Moreover,
most publications did not target why a specific placemaking theme
was selected above others, or how the resulting community narra-
tive was used by decision makers to tackle the actual placemaking
issue in question.
Middle out consideration. Future research could commence from
a real-world placemaking perspective rather than simulating an
artificial perspective to ensure the reproducible evaluation of a
technological innovation. Our findings suggest that this ecological
validity can be achieved by: 1) forcing the researcher “out” of the
placemaking interface dialog model, and 2) opening up gatekeeping
tasks to stakeholders who already take part in the placemaking
process. By combining placemaking interfaces with the process of
infrastructuring, the narratives would not only respond to more
locally relevant concerns instead of targeting technological motives
(as also mentioned by [33]), but also initiate socially-driven inter-
actions between citizens that in turn can lead to social innovation,
and longer-term engagement with the placemaking interface [40].
From a technological perspective, this yet means that the back-end
system that facilitates the publishing and moderating of the com-
munity narrative should become accessible and usable for citizens
possessing varying levels of digital literacy, instead or in addition
to the gatekeeper.
As increasing the ecological validity will lead to more challeng-
ing placemaking contexts, the public interface should then also
3) shift from a fragile experimental technological probe to a high-
fidelity prototype that is sufficiently robust to withstand potential
physical and digital misuse. We believe that developing for the
real-world use of a placemaking interface will bring about novel
research opportunities, from overcoming the social and cultural in-
hibitors that withhold certain parts of the population to participate
(truthfully), to ensuring that the resulting community narrative is
capable of influencing the official decision making. Future evalua-
tion studies could then benchmark these new public interfaces in
terms of attracting hard-to-reach citizens as well as substantially
influencing a local placemaking agenda.
4.2 How Placemaking Interfaces are Motivated
Despite the common goal of providing a dialogical platform to
facilitate interaction between all stakeholders, most placemaking
MAB20, June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands
interfaces only enabled discussion between citizens. We recognised
this apparent lack of bi-directional feedback by two indicators:
The relative scarcity of open inquiry interfaces. The rela-
tive high number of ’reflection’ and ’official inquiry interfaces’ (32,
N=40) versus the sparse occurrences of truly ’open inquiry inter-
faces’ (7, N=40) that allow citizens to have control over both the
creation and feedback components, suggest that setting up true
bilateral communication is challenging. On a technical level, each
stakeholder needs access to dedicated interfaces that allow explor-
ing, filtering and curating the data storages; on a conceptual level,
these stakeholders need to be engaged more actively over longer
periods of time.
The relative scarcity of bi-directional feedback. Almost all
inquiry interfaces (24, N=25) provided some sort of feedback to
citizens, such as by displaying pre-defined narratives to acknowl-
edge the submission of a personal narrative [43] or providing a
data visualisation that summarises the collected responses to a
polling question [12]. Yet we identified only four (N=25) interfaces
[14, 34, 51, 66] that allowed decision makers or gatekeepers to re-
spond to the personal narratives directly via the interface itself.
However, even when the community narrative is fed back to the
public, this feedback does not necessarily reach the previously
addressed citizens, as they are required to return to the physical
location of the interface. As current placemaking interface tech-
nologies are still impractical in facilitating more spontaneous and
anonymous discussion functionalities that are typically found in
e.g. online forums, such as textual commenting or tagging other
users [59], the quality and depth of this feedback is still relatively
limited. The finding that an inquiry interface tends to lack a dialogic
feedback loop with a community narrative after citizens submitted
their personal narratives has been explained by [66] by how the
slow-paced administrative decision making process often outlasts
the duration of a typical public display deployment. We additionally
argue that the current lack of tools to create a community narrative
by both decision makers and citizens is due to how the underlying
scientific motivations were not intrinsically interested in evaluating
their placemaking interface for this goal.
Middle out consideration.
Future research could develop new technological means to facil-
itate iterative and bi-directional dialogical loops between decision
makers and citizens. Not only would this mean that decision makers
require specialised tools to moderate a large and varied collection
of personal narratives into a a representative community narrative,
but also that this resulting community narrative can then be treated
as empirically grounded evidence to inform the decision making.
This goal could include developing a set of indicators that capture
how the gathered personal narratives are representative to the local
population, such as by monitoring the socio-demographic make-up
of participating citizens [32],; or qualitatively capturing in how far
the involved decision makers trust the resulting community narra-
tive [10]. Research findings could then report on how the successive
rounds of feedback changed the local understanding of citizens or
decision makers, or how the different community narratives were
used by decision makers in addressing their placemaking issues.
177
P. Biedermann, A. Vande Moere
4.3 How Placemaking Interfaces are Deployed
Most placemaking interfaces reaffirm the prototypical hierarchical
distance between stakeholders instead of upending it. This power-
imbalance can be identified by two indicators.
Decision makers are not citizens.
From the 19 deployments (N=40) that specified the involvement
of a decision maker, only two involved non-unionised or ’every-
day’ citizens (i.e. home owners. [78] and refugees [76]) instead of
organisations with established power, such as local governments
and business operators (N=9) or NGO’s and neighbourhood com-
mittees (N=8). From our own anecdotal experience, this might be
best explained by how working with existing local organisations
speeds up access to crucial resources, such as data, official permits,
supporters or a large cohort of participants. Enabling true ’bottom-
up’ placemaking requires more time-consuming and haphazard
actions like flyering, door-to-door advertising or social media posts
- and even then, one could argue that the researchers initiated and
facilitated this placemaking instead of the citizens.
Citizens are not deeply involved with the deployment.
Most placemaking interfaces (14, N=19) that involved support-
ers, i.e. citizens that partook in a more meaningful way than only
contributing a personal narrative, entrusted them with rather inci-
dental tasks, such as providing usability feedback on a particular
interface designs, or hosting the interface itself. In contrast, the
other five interfaces also allowed supporters to contribute or even
co-determine how the personal narratives were used, such as by
providing them direct access to the feedback component [34, 43],
or involving them in workshops or co-design sessions to determine
the call to action [5, 16, 73]
Middle out consideration. We propose that the next generation of
middle-out interfaces could turn our placemaking interface dialog
model upside down. It could be a local community itself that deter-
mines the placemaking theme and call-to-action. The community
could then invite different decision makers to submit their own
— and potentially different — narratives on the matter that then
can be filtered by individual citizens. These public interfaces would
then upend the traditional hierarchy of placemaking by integrat-
ing new technological tools that allow each stakeholder to take
charge or at least influence the underlying placemaking agenda.
As proposed by [53], these ’bottom-up’ tools could truly shift the
agency of citizens by considering more open-ended and perhaps
unpredictable appropriations of participation. Once placemaking
interfaces are implemented more like (open-source) tool-kits that
invite rich adoption and appropriation rather than one-off tech-
nological prototypes, researchers could potentially evaluate how
stakeholders make use of them, and what societal value they are
able to create.
4.4 How Placemaking Interfaces are
Represented
The use of certain technological means inherently affords or re-
stricts the agency of citizens.
The interface medium restricts interactivity. Our review
suggests that the choice of interface typology correlates with the
use of certain creation and feedback components. For instance, Ta-
ble 1 suggests that reflection interfaces (13, N=40) almost exclusively
A Critical Review of how Public Display Interfaces Facilitate Placemaking
display a community narrative by abstracting the personal narra-
tives through textual (8, N=13) or visual (5, N=13) representations
of data, such as numerical statistics [69, 71] or infographics [8, 38].
While showing numerical data does not require any anonymisa-
tion or moderation by a gatekeeper, data only forms a discrete and
limited picture of reality that might be experienced differently by
citizens. Similarly, a community narrative presented in the form
of data often abstracts the needs or opinions of citizens into an
average, while it is often the outlying sentiments that spark new
discussions and ideas. In turn, inquiry interfaces (25, N=40) seem
to predominantly utilise polling systems (13, N=25), such tangible
voting devices [73] or touch-enabled questionnaires [69], whereas
communication interfaces (14, N=40) exclusively afforded the cre-
ation of more open-ended personal narratives using a combination
of audio, video, photo or text [22, 28, 46]. As these rich media types
allow for more ambiguous and qualitative narratives, they can con-
textualise local opinions in more subjective and expressive terms.
The underlying opportunities are perhaps most exemplified in the
case of tangible inquiry interfaces [4, 74], of which the personal
narratives can only be fully comprehended by those who were
physically present during its actual construction.
Middle out consideration. Future research could progress towards
placemaking interfaces that combine the advantages of anony-
mous data measurements or polling statistics to reveal a real-time
overview of a local situation with the expressive yet situated quali-
ties of story-based narratives. Consequently, citizens could become
encouraged by data-driven calls-to-action that display actual (sen-
sor or opinion) measurements of a locally relevant phenomenon,
to which they can then respond via more open-ended text- or
video-based reflections. Beyond these considerations, the creation
component of an placemaking interface should be designed as sim-
ple and inclusive as possible to also capture and represent opinions
of perhaps less technologically connected social groups, such as
the homeless [41].
4.5 How Placemaking Interfaces are
Controlled
Most placemaking interfaces are controlled by an external party
who operates covertly and without much accountability. As a re-
sult, citizens are often unable to ascertain the provenance of a
placemaking interface, understand the reasoning behind the mod-
eration of their personal narratives, or simply access the collection
of narratives for themselves to explore contrasting ideas or identify
potential filtering biases.
Opaque accountability. Our model (Figure 4) illustrates how
the power of a placemaking interface is centralized within the
gatekeeper. With the ability to filter and moderate both personal and
community narratives, this stakeholder has the most power to steer
the participation process. At the same time, the existence or identity
of the gatekeeper seems rarely explicitly acknowledged to citizens,
which forces them to interpret the authorship of an interface via
textual or graphical legends [8], via the implied ownership of the
location of the interface [73, 78], or the physical materiality of the
interface [9].
Content and data access. While it is recommended in visuali-
sation research to provide users with direct and transparent access
178
MAB20, June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands
to the original data sources and clear and honest descriptions of
the data acquisition and analysis process [47], our review did not
reveal similar mechanisms for placemaking interfaces.
Fairness. Most publications did not explain how the personal
narratives were filtered before they were being displayed, or only
described it as an incidental activity that was carried out by the
gatekeeper. As also [59] noticed, this apparent lack to moderate
narratives might be explained by how this gatekeeping task is
difficult to delegate to other stakeholders, as it requires a certain
degree of technical literacy and availability. In addition, [36] stated
that moderating publicly relevant narratives in a representative
way is not trivial and always open for certain bias, as the involved
stakeholders might have their own underlying agenda that is not
necessarily reconcilable with the resulting community narrative.
Even when it only consists of selecting a range of numerical sensor
measurements that represent local air pollution levels [5] or editing
an audio-visual story created by local citizens [28], such filtering
bias might even present itself unintentionally, such as when a gate-
keeper edits out boring bits within user-generated videos that yet
were perceived as meaningful by the authors [48].
Middle out consideration. The next generation of placemaking
interfaces should better articulate and communicate the process of
gatekeeping towards citizens as well as to academic peers. Poten-
tially achievable efforts in this direction could consist of: clearly
announcing the identity, affiliation and contact details of the gate-
keeper; explicitly acknowledging the process of moderation, such
as by clearly conveying how the shown narrative only forms a
sample of the available data (in [44] for instance, inappropriate con-
tributions were displayed in an encrypted way, so that the citizens
would still be aware that these contributions were recorded yet re-
jected); and allowing direct and open access to all available content,
such as by enabling citizens to explore a community narrative from
different angles, instead of only presenting the pre-determined con-
clusions [18]. While it is already known that personal narratives
can increase the acceptance of a placemaking interface within a
community by gaining its trust [56] and a perceived sense of owner-
ship [42], we additionally propose that this citizen-driven ’creation’
activity should also include the moderation and filtering of that
content. Citizens can be supported in acquiring the technological
skills to handle these tasks, by involving them in the deployment
process as early as possible, such as by including in the develop-
ment of certain parts of the placemaking interface [65]. Community
champions, who are often trusted and accessible members of a com-
munity [68], seem to be the most obvious stakeholders to fulfil
these types of gatekeeping tasks.
5 LIMITATIONS
As this study is not positioned as a systematic literature review,
our conclusions should not be generalised outside of the currently
dominant directions of placemaking in the field of human-computer
interaction in general, and public display research in particular. As
such, a more systematic review method might have provided more
trust in the main findings, in particular to matters that regard to
the relative frequency of the observed phenomena. We also realise
that other placemaking interfaces might exist in both practice and
academic research that deserve a place in our review, within HCI
MAB20, June 28-July 2, 2021, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Netherlands
as well as in social and urban studies, social geography, arts- or
design-based studies, community-based, place-based and partic-
ipatory (design) research, and many other disciplines. Although
the five middle-out considerations are technologically constrained
to our literature sample, we however have confidence that our
findings also apply for a much larger practice of placemaking that
synthesises a collection of personal narratives into a community
narrative.
Due to the inconsistency in how the different publications re-
ported the processes that drove their placemaking interface deploy-
ments, we might have misinterpreted some interfaces to fall within
the wrong categories. We note however that our model and its
classifications are not exhaustive nor deterministic but meant as an
open-ended invitation to add more examples and critical considera-
tions that reveal the inhibiting or promoting factors of placemaking
interfaces.
6 CONCLUSION
This paper presented a critical narrative review by systematically
analysing 36 academic publications that together describe the de-
ployment of 40 different placemaking interfaces. It contributes to
this emerging domain by proposing an encompassing relational
model of how placemaking interfaces facilitate a dialogic platform
between the different stakeholders, and by recognising how three
interface typologies exist that differ by how they empower the
different stakeholders to shape a community narrative from a col-
lection of personal narratives. Top-down reflection interfaces al-
low decision makers to inform or influence citizen opinions and
behaviours, while bottom-up communication interfaces allow cit-
izens to determine the community narrative being shown, and
inquiry interfaces facilitate more bi-directional inquiries between
both stakeholder groups. Based on these findings, we discussed
how most current placemaking interfaces: 1) are still based on
solving utilitarian motives, rather than facilitating placemaking
itself; 2) focus on enabling a dialogue among citizens, instead of
between citizens and decision makers; 3) reaffirm the prototypical
hierarchy of the different stakeholders instead of upending them;
4) make use of technological means that inherently limit citizen
agency; and 5) are often controlled by an external party who oper-
ates covertly and without much accountability. We then proposed a
set of "middle-out" considerations that have the potential to inform
the next generation of placemaking interfaces to facilitate a true
bilateral dialogue between decision makers and citizens.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is part of CityStory, an ITEA3 funded project of call 4
(reference: 17006). Moreover, we would like to express our sincere
gratitude to Jekaterina Aleksejeva for her invaluable support in the
design and composition of the graphical model, as well as Jorgos
Coenen for his rigorous efforts in reviewing this paper and the
insightful feedback.
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