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April 18, 2007
Lit Review - Notification Collage
The Notification Collage: Posting Information to Public and Personal Displays (Greenberg and Rounding 2001)This paper describes the design, development, and implementation of the Notification Collage, a public designed to serve as a digital bulletin board and promote awareness between collocated and distal individuals. The notification collage, allowed users of a research lab to post notes, picture slide shows, web pages, movies and other content to a shared public display. The display was also used to display video of lab members who had webcams, thus users in the lab could see if their telecommuting lab mates were at their desks or not. Lab users who were not collocated and could not use the large shared display were able to view the contents of the shared display remotely using a client application. The client application was designed to run full screen on a peripheral monitor, or overlaid transparently on a user’s primary monitor.
The author’s focus their discussion on the role of environmental artifacts on awareness. For example, as previously mentioned the streaming video of users at their desks provided awareness information about distal users. Ephemeral slideshows, post-it notes, posted web pages, and activity logs served to provide personal content about each user, while providing context for Notification Collage inspired interactions. The authors also discuss 10 attributes of awareness, and which of these attributes can be supported through technology. Their discussion is largely antidotal, but insightful none the less, some of their comments are: people used the display for both synchronous and asynchronous interaction, some users felt there were privacy issues, artifacts posted on the display were normally self representative or used to initiate conversation, and the differences between one-to-one, overhead, & broadcast communication. They note that although the existing CSCW literature has touched upon the individual technologies used in their system, no other single system integrates these technologies in a form designed to foster awareness in small group settings.
The big takeaway from this paper is that information plays a role in awareness, and awareness can be provided by content on a public display. It is also important to understand how medium and context mediates how information is reached and reacted to.
Greenberg, S. and M. Rounding (2001). The notification collage: posting information to public and personal displays. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Seattle, Washington, United States, ACM Press.
I don't know about you, but notification collage has always been one of my favorite HCI Systems. [I guess I am after all a Virginia Tech Notification Systems Lab Alumni]
Posted by bcx at April 18, 2007 12:29 AM