Bannerbattle: introducing crowd experience to interaction design

Abstract

We introduce crowd experience as an emergent field in interaction design research. Crowds as social phenomena are already well-established as a research theme in sociology and social psychology. However, the understanding of crowds as users of technology is so far unexplored. Based on the existing literature on crowd behavior, we identify three distinct qualities of crowd experience, which we introduce to interaction design: imitation, emergence, and self-organization. These three qualities informed the design of the research prototype, BannerBattle, which is an interactive display to support crowd experiences at football stadiums. Based on findings in the case study, we discuss how crowd theory complements and challenges existing experience-centered design approaches. We suggest that crowd theory is an important resource when designing technology to support crowd experiences. Moreover, a focus on crowd experience may nuance and expand the already well-established field of experience-centered design research.