Situated public news and reminder displays

Abstract

In this paper we present concepts for and experiences with a Situated Public Display system deployed in a university setting. We identify the rate with which information is updated as an important property to distinguish different kinds of information. With a first slideshow based prototype it was very difficult for users to predict whether information was updated since they last looked. To solve this problem, we took a broader view and conducted a contextual inquiry to investigate how people deal with paper based posters. We deduced an information flow diagram that identifies roles of people and categories of posters and noticeboards. We identified actionables, that is, posters that offer people to take a specific action, as a special type of information to support. We identified two strategies, planning and opportunism, to deal with actionable information. We present a system using two kinds of displays, News Displays and Reminder Displays, to support both strategies. We show how auctions can be used for Reminder Displays to select those information chunks that are most important in a particular context. Finally, we present an evaluation and lessons from the deployment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.