Considering Communities, Diversity and the Production of Locality in the Design of Networked Urban Screens

Highly diverse settings such as London (with people from ~179 countries speaking ~300 languages) are unique in that ethnic or socio-cultural backgrounds are no longer sufficient to generate a sense of place, belonging and community. Instead, residents actively perform place building activities on an ongoing basis, which we believe is of great importance when deploying interactive situated technologies in public spaces. This paper investigates community and place building within a complex multicultural context. We approached this using ethnography, complemented with workshops in the wild. By studying the relationships arising between different segments of the community and two networked screen nodes, we examine the place building activities of residents, and how screen nodes are incorporated into them. Our research suggests that urban screens will be framed (and eventually used) as part of this continuing process of social, spatial and cultural construction. This highlights the importance of enabling socially meaningful relations between the people mediated by these technologies.