%0 Journal Article %A Claes, Sandy %A Wouters, Niels %A Slegers, Karin %A Vande Moere, Andrew %D 2015 %T Controlling In-the-Wild Evaluation Studies of Public Displays %! Controlling In-the-Wild Evaluation Studies of Public Displays %I ACM %B Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2015 %X In this paper, we investigate the potential of controlled in- the-wild studies as an evaluation methodology that merges the benefits of lab-based and in-the-wild studies. Our exploratory investigation builds upon a comparative, between subject experiment benchmarking different interaction features of a custom public installation that visualized a series of urban datasets. In order to evaluate the usefulness of the in-the-wild versus the controlled in-the- wild methodologies, we compared the resulting findings in terms of participant engagement, insight generation, and social interaction. We propose that a controlled in-the-wild study offers a viable alternative when evaluating more complex interaction methods in public space, hereby potentially reducing the practical efforts of in-the-wild studies to involve participants. %R 10.1145/2702123.2702353