The interacting places framework: conceptualizing public display applications that promote community interaction and place awareness

The proliferation of public displays, along with ubiquitous wireless communication and sensing technology, has made it possible to create a novel public communication medium: open networked pervasive displays would allow citizens to provide their own content, appropriate close-by displays, and increase their own awareness of a display's surroundings and its local communities. We envision that such displays can create interacting places, i. e., public spaces that promote community interaction and place awareness. In this paper we describe our Interacting Places Framework (IPF), a conceptual framework for designing applications in this novel research space that we developed based on four distinct public display studies. Our IPF focuses on 4 elements: 1) content providers, i. e., entities that will supply content; 2) content viewers, i. e., people who are addressed by the content; 3) communication channels that deliver the content and range from inclusive, i. e., open-for-everyone, to exclusive, i. e., closed-group channels; and 4) an awareness diffusion layer that describes how community awareness building happens both explicitly, i. e., through content tailored towards a specific audience, and implicitly, by observing output for other people.