Social interaction around a rural community photo display

Abstract

Public displays of photographs are a common sight in community spaces, yet while much attention has been given recently to the use of digital photography in the home, the community domain remains underexplored. We describe the Wray Photo Display, a public situated display for community-generated photography in an English rural village, which aims to understand the community's use of photos for social purposes and the ways in which public display technology may support these social interactions. This article presents the techniques used in designing and evaluating the display as well as understanding the community and its use of photos, and our discussion of the issues and challenges presented by this study.

Understanding future challenges for networked public display systems in community settings

“…We want to note here and make it clear that other similar systems could have been analyzed as well and the four do not necessarily represent the "best" by some rigorous standard, but rather by the systems' properties and the way they were designed and evaluated. In the sections below we will describe the Wray Photo Display [40], the Plasma Poster Network [6], the CoCollage [20], and the UBI-Hotspots [36]. For each system we will first describe its functionality, followed by the description of the setting and community, system design process, research questions, as well as evaluation procedure and documented effects.…”

“…Most of these works investigated different settings, e.g., communities in rural villages [16,40], third places such as cafes and bars [17,20], or urban public areas [2,23,39]. There were different processes that lead to the design of the systems, from full and immersive participatory design [40] to the more distant ones where the infrastructure was simply put into the setting [36].…”

“…Most of these works investigated different settings, e.g., communities in rural villages [16,40], third places such as cafes and bars [17,20], or urban public areas [2,23,39]. There were different processes that lead to the design of the systems, from full and immersive participatory design [40] to the more distant ones where the infrastructure was simply put into the setting [36]. Also these systems had varying applications running on them, e.g., photo booth like applications that allowed passers-by to take the photos [23], digital public notice boards that allowed information exchange between community members [2], or applications that allowed passers-by to post opinions in the form of text messages about locally relevant topics [39].…”

“…In order to inform future researchers, designers, and developers that are looking to work in the area of networked public displays for communities we examine four seminal works, i.e., the Wray Photo Display [40], the Plasma Poster Network [6], CoCollage [20], and the work around UBI-Hotspots [36]. Our goal with this analysis is to synthesize their work and present similarities and differences in the way they were designed and built, the main research questions that were examined, as well as the effects they have produced on communities where they were deployed, allowing to determine what was done and what are the future challenges in this area.…”

Supporting the consumption and co-authoring of locative media experiences for a rural village community: design and field trial evaluation of the SHARC2.0 framework

“…The project builds on our on-going longitudinal 'research in the wild' [10] with the village and in particular our research involving the design and long-term deployment of a situated digital display system. This system, known as the WrayDisplay, supports the sharing of photos submitted by village residents [51]. Since 2006, the touch-screen displays have been deployed in key places within the village such as the village Post Office, local café, village hall and, most recently, the village pub (see Fig.…”