The Interacting Places Framework – Conceptualizing Public Display Applications that Promote Community Interaction and Place Awareness

The proliferation of public displays, along with ubiquitous wire-less 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 con-tent, appropriate close-by displays, and increase their own aware-ness of a display’s surroundings and its local communities. We envision that such displays can create interacting places, i.e., pub-lic spaces that promote community interaction and place aware-ness. 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 view-ers, i.e., people who are addressed by the content; 3) communica-tion 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 communi-ty awareness building happens both explicitly, i.e., through con-tent tailored towards a specific audience, and implicitly, by ob-serving output for other people