Design Strategies for Overcoming Failures on Public Interactive Displays

Public space is becoming increasingly augmented by public displays, bringing digital content into the real-world. Consequently, as public displays are a form of computing, they are prone to experiencing failure related to their hardware and software. In this paper, we investigate the types of failures that can arise on public interactive displays (PIDs) and how redundancy measures can be designed to ensure that a PID remains relevant even when a failure occurs. To gain an ecological understanding of failures, we focus on results that emerged from a field observation study and contextualise our findings within previous literature. From this, we contribute five design strategies for avoiding and mitigating the impact of these hardware and software failures. To assist designers and researchers of PIDs, we also present a failure matrix, which classifies failures along with suggestions on how they can be overcome. Our work specifically highlights the need for PIDs to become more adaptive and to include built-in redundancy measures, allowing them to at least partially recover from certain types of failures.