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April 25, 2006
Café Life in the Digital Age: Augmenting Information Flow in
Elizabeth F. Churchill, Les Nelson, PARC, USA
Gary Hsieh, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
In this paper we describe our installation of a large-screen
public, interactive community board, the eyeCanvas, in a
neighbourhood café and art gallery in San Francisco.
The concept consists of a large touch screen placed in a café area. The goal is to merge the concept of online sharing (like Flikr, MySpace, etc.) with the real world (like flyers, poster boards, etc.).
On the screen, café visitors could make their own drawings using their fingers (people often used the stirring stick from their coffee) and send them through e-mail/keep them in a library at the screen. They could also sign up for mailing lists and comment in a suggestion book. 12 installations were placed, mostly in places where WiFi was common (people often bring their PC to communicate/work on these places).
The methods used were observations, surveys, interviews and content analysis.
The results (which were considered "sad" by the authors) showed that the screen did not replace the suggestions book completely. The screen was however a nice medium to leave messages and comments to the staff. The screen actually became a topic of conversation itself.
The screen was not a priority for communication with the owners. The maintenance of hardware and online content turned out to be too much work. Also, the owners were not willing to deploy community space.
After the screen was removed, the customers were requesting it back. The customers could see it "fitting the image".
There were 7-800 finger clicks on a typical saturday, 1466 scribbles between October 8th and December 17th, and 131 e-mails sent over the 5 months.
Posted by sv2 at April 25, 2006 01:08 PM
