Status on display: A field trial of Nomatic*Viz

Abstract

The use of personal status messages is becoming a part of popular culture through wide-spread instant messaging (IM) adoption, the growth of social networking websites and the increased connectivity provided by mobile phones. However, the implications of status broadcasting and people's behavior in the milieu of social life is still poorly under-stood. In this paper, we present the results of a field trial in which we examined how community members come to understand and appropriate a status broadcasting service into their daily use. We designed Nomatic*Viz, a situated large display showing people's location and status messages to complement an existing status message distribution tool called Nomatic*IM. Through a five month field study of its use we uncovered not only how it supports lightweight awareness of the community, but also how it participates in creating new spatial experiences and how people perform and negotiate self-representations through multiple simultaneous displays of personal status.