Interacting places — A framework for promoting community interaction and place awareness through public displays

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 ultimately 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), which helps to identify challenges and opportunities in this novel research space. Our IPF has 4 elements: (1) content providers, i.e., entities that supply content; (2) content viewers, i.e., people who consume the content; (3) a number of interacting places communication channels that range from inclusive, i.e., open-for-everyone, and exclusive, i.e., closed-group communication; and (4) an awareness diffusion layer that promotes community interaction either explicitly, i.e., through content tailored towards a specific audience, or implicitly, by observing output for other people. We have begun initial deployments examining this space and will use the framework presented here to analyze future results.