Interactive Community Bulletin Boards as Conversational Hubs and Sites for Playful Visual Repartee

In this paper we describe an interactive community bulletin board we installed within a neighborhood café and art gallery, and the interactions that take place around and through the board. The board featured café information and email list sign up, but also allowed customers to create publicly displayed, persistent, finger-drawn, digital scribbles. In providing this community composition and posting feature, our board differed from more commonly available designs for one-way advertising of products. Following analysis of the scribbles, and interviews with scribble creators and readers, we offer a brief description of the textual and visual play and repartee patrons engaged in. We discuss content forms posted to the board, differentiating between solitary and collaborative play, messaging, and conversational exchange. Our discussion addresses open questions regarding the perspectives and theories that can be applied to address this new form of site-specific, public media exchange. ....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: Elizabeth F. Churchill, Les Nelson
• Keywords: Biometrics, Board Featured Café, Community Bulletin Board, HICSS 2007, Neighborhood Café, System Sciences