Traces: Studying a Public Reactive Floor-Projection of Walking Trajectories to Support Social Awareness

Walking trajectories have been used to understand how users interact with public displays. However, it has not yet been studied how displaying them in-situ could affect users’ awareness about others’ presence and activities. We present the study of an interactive public floor-projection called Traces. Traces projects the walking trajectories of individuals as they pass through the lobby of a university building. We investigated Traces through a 6 week in-field study. Our results outline how different uses and understandings of Traces contributed towards its appropriation as a glanceable display for social awareness. We outline design suggestions that future designers should consider to support social awareness with public displays.