Understanding Future Challenges for Networked Public Display Systems in Community Settings

Networked public displays are envisioned as a communication medium for the 21st century, and as such they have a great potential to address place-based communities. This area has seen an increasing numbers of investigations of networked public displays effects on communities and the way they impact interactions between community members. However, most of this research stands alone in isolation, with little work looking into synthesizing the systems, processes, research questions, and evaluation procedures and effects they produce. In this paper we look at seminal works in the area, i.e., the Wray Photo Display, the Plasma Poster Network, CoCollage, and UBI-Hotspots, and analyze the systems themselves, settings in which they were deployed and respective communities, the processes leading to building up the system, the research questions that were examined, and the effects of the networked public display systems on the community. We discuss the similarities and differences in these works and provide insights for the designers and developers of similar future systems, with a goal to present open challenges for the future work