Fig. 1. The four investigated deployments of the same public polling system in different real-world cases. MobiHubs (MH) asked passers-by about their mobility habits and interests. Housing through Numbers (HN) polled local opinions about housing statistics. Habit(at) Breaker (HB) gathered insight into housing preferences. Ring Parks (RP) polled visitors towards the redesign of city parks.Public polling displays, i.e. interactive interfaces that offer questionnaires in public space, are promised to engage citizens in a dialog with civic stakeholders around local concerns. Although past studies already revealed the core factors that impact their usability, little is known about whether these civic stakeholders actually consider the deployment of public polling displays to be valuable. We therefore interviewed 12 stakeholders who engaged in four different real-world cases, and analyzed all the underlying collaborative activities that ranged from planning the deployments to interpreting the final polling results. We thus report on eight key challenges, among which: designing polls that are responsive, decisive and accessible yet also generate actionable insights, managing the trust of participants as well as the expectations of stakeholders, and facilitating the accurate interpretation of the responses. By understanding the impact of public polling displays from the perspective of stakeholders who actually funded their deployment, we inform its potential evolution towards an opportunistic but also trustworthy civic engagement method. CCS Concepts: • Applied computing → Computing in government; • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in ubiquitous and mobile computing.

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Backpacks are often heavy and can be a significant cause of pain. To avoid pain, they must be worn in a certain way and readjusted when they move. Yet, recognising when to adjust a backpack is not selfevident. It is an evolving embodied process-a subtle, negotiation between body and pack. We present Sensepack, a wearable that sits in-between a backpacker's body and their pack. Sensepack supports novice backpackers to learn to recognise and sense backpack displacement. It monitors shifts in weight distribution, using four textile-sensors to determine imbalances and provides tactile, real-time feedback. We evaluated Sensepack through user testing-indoors on stairs, and in the field. Our preliminary findings suggest that Sensepack may be useful for learning to identify shifts in backpack weight that can cause long-term stress on the body.

As aresponse to traditional (top‐down) urban planning processes, placemaking engages local citizens in the process of shaping the form, social activity, and meaning of places around them. However, placemaking practices similarly face political challenges regarding inclusion and emplacement. These challenges relate to who participates, facilitation through linguistic discourse, and place engagement itself. Attempting to address these challenges, this article (based on a pilot study) reports on the design and deployment of the StoryMapper, a traveling placemaking interface that uses a participant‐driven “chain of engagement” recruiting process to invite participants to create emplaced “morphings” (i.e., visually produced stories superimposed on public space) to spark dialogue on a digitally facilitated living map. This pilot study took place within a larger placemaking project that engages citizens to share their ideas regarding the reconversion of a community church. Plugging the Storymapper into this larger project, we discuss preliminary findings relating to the role of placemaking facilitators in citizen‐driven recruitment and the role of multimodality in placemaking processes. This pilot study suggests that inclusion should not only be evaluated based on who participates and who does not, but also on how the tool itself, in its capacity to engage participants to visualize complex emplaced ideas, may facilitate inclusion of different publics.