Joseph F. McCarthy

Augmenting the social space of an academic conference

Academic conferences provide a social space for people to present their work, learn about others work, and interact informally with one another. However, opportunities for interaction are unevenly distributed among the attendees. We seek to extend these opportunities by allowing attendees to easily reveal something about their background and interests in different settings through the use of proactive displays: computer displays coupled with sensors that can sense and respond to the people nearby. We designed, implemented and deployed a suite of proactive display applications at a recent academic conference: AutoSpeakerID augmented formal conference paper sessions; Ticket2Talk augmented informal coffee breaks. A mixture of qualitative observation and survey response data are used to frame the impacts of these applications from both individual and group perspectives, highlighting the creation of new opportunities for both interaction and distraction. We end with a discussion of how these social space augmentations relate to the concepts of focus and nimbus as well as the problem of shared interaction models.

Digital backchannels in shared physical spaces: experiences at an academic conference

There are a variety of digital tools for enabling people who are physically separated by time and space to communicate and collaborate. Widespread use of some of these tools, such as instant messaging and group chat, coupled with the increasingly availability of wireless Internet access, have created new opportunities for using these collaboration tools by people sharing physical spaces in real time. Such digital backchannels affect interactions and experiences in a variety of ways, depending on the spaces, the participants, and the relationships among them. We focus on the space of an academic conference, a physical space designed for voluntary participation by people with shared interests, seeking to share knowledge and connect with others. We present and analyze system logs and interview data from a recent conference, highlight some of the advantages and disadvantages experienced both by those who used the tools and by those who did not, and discuss implications and considerations for future use and research.

Supporting community in third places with situated social software

The Community Collage (CoCollage) is designed to cultivate community in a café, a quintessential third place, by bringing the richness of online social software into a physical community space. The system shows photos and quotes uploaded to a web site by café patrons and staff on a large computer display in the café, providing a new channel for awareness, interactions and relationships among people there. We describe the CoCollage system and report on insights and experiences resulting from a 2-month deployment of the system, focusing on the impact the system has had on the sense of community within the café.

Proactive displays & the experience UbiComp project

The proliferation of sensing and display technologies creates opportunities for proactive displays that can sense and respond appropriately to the people and activities taking place in their vicinity. A conference provides an ideal context in which to explore the use of proactive displays, as attendees come together for the purpose of mutual revelation, eager both to learn more about others and what others are doing and to tell others about themselves and what they are doing. We will deploy a suite of proactive display applications that can aid and abet this desire for mutual revelation in the context of a paper presentation session, a demonstration and poster session, and informal break areas at the conference.

The context, content & community collage: sharing personal digital media in the physical workplace

Online social media services enable people to share many aspects of their personal interests and passions with friends, acquaintances and strangers. We are investigating how the display of social media in a workplace context can improve relationships among collocated colleagues. We have designed, developed and deployed the Context, Content and Community Collage, which runs on large LCD touchscreen computers installed in eight locations throughout a research laboratory. This proactive display application senses nearby people via Bluetooth phones, and responds by incrementally adding photos associated with those people to an ambient collage shown on the screen. This paper describes the motivations, goals, design and impact of the system, highlighting the ways the system has increased interactions and improved personal relationships among coworkers at the deployment site. We also look at how the creation of a shared physical window into online media has affected the use of that media.

Measuring the impact of third place attachment on the adoption of a place-based community technology

CoCollage is a placed-based community technology that leverages the power of online social networking to facilitate awareness and face-to-face interactions in a third place. We adapted standardized measures of place attachment, social networks and psychological sense of community to provide a framework grounded in the social science literature for studying real world adoption of place-based community technologies. We found the standardized measures of place attachment and psychological sense of community meaningfully predicted likelihood of technology adoption and usage in a café. We discuss some lessons learned from our initial deployment of CoCollage in a real-world setting to support a nascent place-based community.

Digital backchannels in shared physical spaces: attention, intention and contention

There are a variety of digital tools for enabling people who are separated by time and space to communicate and collaborate on shared interests and tasks. The widespread use of some of these tools, such as instant messaging and group chat, coupled with the increasingly widespread availability of wireless access to the Internet (WiFi), have created new opportunities for using these collaboration tools by people sharing physical spaces in real time. The use of these tools to augment face-to-face meetings has created benefits for some participants and distractions-and detractions-for others. Our panelists will discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of these emerging uses of collaborative tools.

Promoting a Sense of Community with Ubiquitous Peripheral Displays

Computer display and sensor technologies have advanced to the point where it is increasingly possible to deploy displays in public places that can sense and respond to the people in their vicinities. Several research initiatives are exploring how displays can be used in the foreground to support highly focused collaborative activities. We are exploring how displays can be used in the background or periphery to enrich casual interactions of the people nearby, creating greater mutual awareness of the interests and activities of people in a workplace community. Three applications are described in this chapter: GroupCast uses profiles of people’s interests in conjunction with an infrared personnel badge system to select content of mutual interest to those passing nearby a large, public display in a common area; UniCast runs on a peripheral display in one’s individual workspace, cycling through interesting, non-urgent, visual content specified in a profile created by each individual user; OutCast runs on a display outside an individual office, acting as a virtual proxy by showing content about the occupant that is specifically selected to represent the occupant’s public face. The chapter concludes with a broader discussion of issues common to any application seeking to enhance the experience of people gathered near a public display.