وای فای شهری و نمایش های تعاملی: بکارگیری فن آوری های نوین در فضاهای عمومی شهری

This study focuses on the appropriation process of two public computing infrastructures in the City of Oulu, Finland, a municipal WiFi network and large interactive displays. We analyze the adoption of these technologies in public urban places with a conceptual technology appropriation model involving three layers of factors contributing to the adoption or rejection of a technology. Quantitative data shows that while the use of the WiFi network has grown steadily, the use of the displays has been declining. Qualitative data obtained with ethnographic methods reveals that the adoption of the displays is hampered by their questionable utility and people's apprehension about interacting with the displays in a public social setting. Finally, we identify issues that designers should take into account when deploying these technologies in urban spaces in the future.

Oulu is a city of about 191.000 people in northern Finland, just 200 km south of the Arctic Circle. Downtown Oulu has been transformed into a civic laboratory [1], where different types of computing infrastructure have been deployed and adapted to provide novel applications and services to people. The civic laboratory dubbed Open UBI Oulu is a joint initiative of local academia (the University of Oulu) and municipal government (the City of Oulu), each motivated by their respective complementary objectives to enhance people's everyday lives and interaction between the city and its residents. In this article we explore the appropriation of two public infrastructures: the panOULU WLAN ( Fig. 1(a–b)), a municipal WiFi network providing open, free and unrestricted wireless Internet access; and the UBI-hotspots ( Fig. 1(c)), a network of large interactive displays providing a wide range of information services. Although the “official” given name of the displays is “UBI-hotspots”, in this article, for clarity, we refer to them as “displays” from now on, to avoid confusion with the term hotspot often used in the WiFi context. Full-size image (71 K) Fig. 1. (a–b) panOULU WLAN access points; (c) Outdoor UBI-display. Figure options Appropriation refers to an approach in social science technology studies that strives to explain the adoption of new technologies as a part of everyday life. The two infrastructures, the panOULU WLAN and the displays, were selected for this study, because they are relatively rare as municipal infrastructures, have been publicly available for several years, and are used by a significant number of people. Further, the contrasting characteristics of the two technologies under examination provide an intriguing starting premise for the study. For example, while the panOULU WLAN is practically invisible and its usage is not tied to a certain fixed device or to a certain place, the displays are very visible, situated and their usage can be compared to public performance. We base our exploration on two complementary datasets. First, our quantitative data comprises a two-year usage log of the infrastructures and a questionnaire study of local university and high school students on their perception and usage of the infrastructures. Second, using ethnographic methods we have collected qualitative data which enable us to explain and understand why people have (not) used the infrastructures in particular ways. While the quantitative data provides an overview of long-term usage trends, complementing it with ethnographic material offers a deeper insight into the data and raises an opportunity to perform “thick description” [2] of people's narrations of their urban practices related to technology. For this purpose we develop a technology appropriation model derived from an existing appropriation model. We take especially into account people's behavior in urban public spaces; through this analysis we scrutinize why the trends in the quantitative usage of these two infrastructures differ so remarkably. Lastly, based on these findings, we identify issues that designers should address when deploying new technologies in urban spaces in the future.

This paper explored the appropriation of two public urban technologies, municipal WiFi and interactive public displays, through a three level technology appropriation model. The municipal WiFi has been adopted very well and its usage is increasing rapidly. The adoption of the interactive public displays has been slow due to several factors, such as the unfamiliarity of the technology and its questionable utility; in addition, people are concerned about engaging with public displays in public settings. Of course, appropriation can be a long process and these two technologies represent different phases of it; the WiFi has been available for a much longer time than the displays. Our study indicates that the appropriation of a new technology in urban surroundings is a complex process that cannot be fully understood without long-term and in-depth multidisciplinary studies. However, by examining both quantitative and qualitative material it is possible to unwind the process and identify the factors either supporting or hampering the adoption of new technologies. It should be noted that different demographic groups may experience these factors in differing ways; for example, for young people the creativity and playfulness of the applications was a more attractive feature than for elderly, who in turn emphasized the utility. By using a micro-scale approach we can also investigate deeper sociocultural factors affecting the appropriation process and take them into account in the design. The importance of these “background” factors means that the research of urban public technologies must always be contextualized. Urban technologies are often designed to fit into a certain kind of social practices, with a certain kind of an imagined user in mind. Conducting in-depth qualitative studies on the age group of young adults and elderly adults revealed that skills, needs and attitudes are not uniform, not even inside a demographically rather homogenous group. The bias in the design and problems in appropriation process could be diminished if different kinds of people using the public urban space were involved in the design process by using for example participatory design [16]. The messiness and diversity of urban reality go far beyond the imagination of a designer.