Ji, Yuhan; (2025) Situating Media Infrastructure: Exploring the Role of Environment Affordance on User Interaction and Planning. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Originating from media studies, the notion of media infrastructure represents a “distributed network of audio-visual content’ in human society, typically radio and billboards”. Since the fall in the cost of display technology, digital screens have become a prevalent form of media infrastructure and constitute a critical part of the urban streets. The introduction of interaction technologies transformed how the public can communicate with media infrastructure, from purely “message receiver” to the “display participant”. Early scholars emphasised the role of the situation in human interaction with digital screens and requested to factor interaction experience into their placement; whereas, in the current planning procedure, key stakeholders still use the criteria designated for traditional, non-interactive screens to site interactive ones, and neglect whether these criteria can fully address the significance of the location in reinforcing user interactions. Existing HCI research have discovered several environmental factors that affect user interaction with urban screens; despite that, there exists a gap concerning the integration of urban design knowledge, which can lead to an incomplete evaluation of how street environment can afford public interactions with media infrastructure. This research aims to explore the role of the street environment in facilitating user interactions and its reflection on the current planning process. I adopt Gibson and Norman’s “Affordance Theory” to represent the street environment’s supportiveness in user interactions. A main case study of an emergent media infrastructure project InLinkUK in two London Boroughs was delivered to achieve the research objectives. Using a mix of research methods, including field observation, street survey, stakeholder interviews and document analysis, this research uncovered key street characteristics’ affordances of user interactions, and identified that street environment affordance is not factored into current decision-making of media infrastructure placement. In addition, the thesis also depicts planning challenges around integrating this affordance into the planning process.

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