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April 11, 2007
Literature Review - Semi-Public Notification System (OE)
Dynamo and this paper were the most interesting public display papers I have read so far in my quest to build a comprehensive understanding of the STATE of the ART in terms of public displays. In their system, Online Enlightenment (OE), they do a great job of discussing the design considerations involved in their display, and some of the theory behind it. [This type of analysis has hardly been touched on in my other readings] -- Admittedly I am a little partial to this paper because the system was deployed in my lab, while I was at Virginia Tech, and I had my own LED on the system :-)
Enlightening a Co-located Community with a Semi-Public Notification System (Terrell and McCrickard 2006)The authors describe the creation of a semi-public notification system (or public display). They emphasize the ability for public displays to shape the “place” in which they are deployed. They attempt to do this by creating a display that could be used with little buy in by members of a small community, in this case a computer science research lab. The display was designed with the help of participatory design, which emphasized the need for the display to not be interruptive, and still provide peripheral awareness of the availability and location of lab members. Interestingly privacy was not a concern for members of the lab, which might be an affect of the semi-public nature of the display. Lab member availability was determined by monitoring their online status using MSN messenger, this technique was not perfect, but the network effect of having all lab members adopt MSN messenger aided its adoption.
The end product was a small display located in the common area of a lab, where a colored LED represented each lab member’s availability. For example, when a lab member was available the LED near their picture would glow green. When the lab member was away their LED was orange, and when they were offline the LED was off. Each LED was labeled with the name and a caricature of the lab member it represented. To evaluate the display, researchers deployed the display in the research lab for 4 months and gathered survey data based on its usage. There evaluation results are mostly antidotal, there were cases where the display helped bridge the gap between people in the lab, and people who were available online, and there were cases where the display helped a lab user track down the rest of his lab group who had just gone to lunch. The evaluation is not the strong point of this paper, but all in all it provides a good overview of some of the social factors that affect semi-public displays, while providing some design guidelines, and antidotes about the deployment of such a display.
Terrell, G. B. and D. S. McCrickard (2006). Enlightening a co-located community with a semi-public notification system. Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work. Banff, Alberta, Canada, ACM Press.
Posted by bcx at April 11, 2007 02:55 AM