Calm Place: Understanding generative ambient screens in public space as encounters with calm technology
Creators: name: POWER, John
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330310
subject: Interaction and experience design
classificationCode: 360503
subject: Digital and electronic media art
classificationCode: 360504
subject: Interactive media

description: My practice-led PhD dissertation details my design, critical reflection, and evaluation and interpretation of an audio-visual generative art installation called Locus Amoenus (Place of Delight). Locus Amoenus was designed to provide hospital visitors with an ambient refuge. Permanently installed in a hospital lounge at the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (and later exhibited at State Library Victoria), the installation consists of a 4.8-meter video wall and a multichannel surround sound system. The installation screen depicts a perpetually changing, naturalistic view of a procedurally generated three-dimensional landscape, local real-time weather data and the diurnal passage of light. The window-like perspectival view of the landscape slowly roams in an indeterminate open-ended journey driven by generative algorithms offering unlimited vantage points for the viewer.

Architecture and interaction design theorist Malcolm McCullough (2013) suggests that global screen ubiquity is contributing to a culture of distraction and an erosion of urban place - consequently he calls for an "ambient commons" that is inclusive of a "right to attention" in public space. In anticipation of screen ubiquity and its distractions, Mark Weiser and John Seely-Brown's (1997) principles of Calm Technology encourage humane computer interfaces that are tuned to the periphery. In a public space, in which screens are ubiquitous, my project aims to challenge notions of "attention" by focusing on ambience as a means to fostering endogenous (internal, volitional) attention and calm in public space. Accordingly, my research is motivated by the following question: What can we understand about Calm Technology through the public encounter with generative ambient screens in public space?

By drawing on ethnographic methods to analyse participant encounters, I explore participants' experiences (and tacit feelings) of Locus Amoenus in public contexts. A detailed abductive interpretation of the public encounter is critically discussed against a definition of Calm Technology, through theories of attention, space, place, place making, and biophilic design.

Based on participant interviews and observations I argue that generative art can counteract distractive influences, and thereby support an ambient commons for urban dwellers. My project makes original contributions in two areas - the deployment of ethnographic methods to reflect on creative practice, and the extension of the principles of Calm Technology to offer perspectives on creating generative art for public spaces that respect and foster the right to attention in the age of screen ubiquity. These contributions moreover offer an innovative way for media artists and designers to transform the use of public screens into a humane attentional intervention at a fundamental level of urban programmes for public space.