Multimedia fliers: information sharing with digital community bulletin boards

Community poster boards serve an important community building function. Posted fliers advertise services, events and people's interests, and invite community members to communicate, participate, interact and transact. In this paper we describe the design, development and deployment of several large screen, digital community poster boards, the Plasma Posters, within our organization. We present our motivation, two fleldwork studies of online and offline information sharing, and design guidelines derived from our observations. After introducing the Plasma Posters and the underlying information storage and distribution infrastructure, we illustrate their use and value within our organization, summarizing findings from qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We conclude by elaborating socio-technical challenges we have faced in our design and deployment process.

[1]  Elizabeth D. Mynatt,et al.  Semi-public displays for small, co-located groups , 2003, CHI '03.

[2]  Saul Greenberg,et al.  The notification collage: posting information to public and personal displays , 2001, CHI.

[3]  Antonietta Grasso,et al.  Diffusing information in organizational settings: learning from experience , 2002, CHI.

[4]  M. Timmers.  The Power of the Poster , 2003 .

[5]  W. Whyte.  The social life of small urban spaces , 1980 .

[6]  Norbert A. Streitz,et al.  i-LAND: an interactive landscape for creativity and innovation , 1999, CHI '99.

[7]  Murray Silverstein,et al.  A Pattern Language , 1977 .

[8]  Mark S. Granovetter.  T H E S T R E N G T H O F WEAK TIES: A NETWORK THEORY REVISITED , 1983 .

[9]  Mark W. Newman,et al.  The designers' outpost: a tangible interface for collaborative web site , 2001, UIST '01.

[10]  Sara A. Bly,et al.  Design through matchmaking: technology in search of users , 1999, INTR.

[11]  Bill N. Schilit,et al.  Beyond paper: supporting active reading with free form digital ink annotations , 1998, CHI.

[12]  Thomas P. Moran,et al.  Tivoli: an electronic whiteboard for informal workgroup meetings , 1993, INTERCHI.

[13]  Stephanie Houde,et al.  In search of design principles for tools and practices to support communication within a learning community , 1998, SGCH.

[14]  Richard Harper,et al.  Keeping people apart , 1993, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[15]  Elizabeth F. Churchill,et al.  The Plasma Poster Network: Posting Multimedia Content in Public Places , 2003, INTERACT.

[16]  B. Wellman.  Living Networked in a Wired World , 1999 .

[17]  Victoria Bellotti,et al.  Walking away from the desktop computer: distributed collaboration and mobility in a product design team , 1996, CSCW '96.

[18]  Lawrence R. Wheeless,et al.  A Research Note , 1982 .

[19]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Email overload: exploring personal information management of email , 1996, CHI.

[20]  R. Oldenburg.  The Great Good Place , 1999 .

[21]  Elizabeth F. Churchill,et al.  The Plasma Poster Network , 2003 .

[22]  Steven R. Strom.  GREAT STREETS , 1997, Landscape Journal.

[23]  Owen Daly-Jones,et al.  Informal workplace communication: what is it like and how might we support it? , 1994, CHI '94.

[24]  Reijo Savolainen.  Everyday life information seeking: Approaching information seeking in the context of “way of life” , 1995 .

[25]  Sara A. Bly,et al.  The rise of personal Web pages at work , 1998, CHI Conference Summary.

[26]  K. O'hara.  Towards a Typology of Reading Goals , 1996 .

[27]  Norbert A. Streitz,et al.  An interactive Landscape for Creativity and Innovation , 1999 .

[28]  Kenton O'Hara,et al.  A diary study of work-related reading: design implications for digital reading devices , 1998, CHI.

[29]  Donald Albrecht,et al.  On the Job -Design and the American Office , 2000 .

[30]  Adam M. Fass,et al.  MessyDesk and MessyBoard: two designs inspired by the goal of improving human memory , 2002, DIS '02.

[31]  Stewart Brand,et al.  How Buildings Learn , 1994 .

[32]  J. Jacobs.  The Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1962 .

[33]  Daniel M. Russell,et al.  Two Paths from the Same Place: Task Driven and Human Centered Evolution of a Group Information Surface , 2003 .

[34]  Tom Rüdebusch.  Computer—Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) , 1993 .

[35]  W. Orlikowski,et al.  Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and Media , 1992 .

[36]  Elaine M. Huang,et al.  Defragmenting the Organization: Disseminating Community Knowledge through Peripheral Displays , 2001 .

[37]  Max Jacobson,et al.  A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction , 1981 .

[38]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Fluid interaction with high-resolution wall-size displays , 2001, UIST '01.