Connecting People through Content – Promoting Community Identity Cognition through People and Places

Large public screens are proliferating in public spaces. Today, most of them are standalone installations that display advertisements in the form of slides, short movies, or still images. However, it is not hard to imagine that these displays will soon be connected through the Internet, thus creating a global and powerful communication medium capable of providing rich, interactive applications. We believe that such a medium has the potential to foster connections within and between communities in public spaces. In this paper we present a research agenda for interacting places, i.e., public spaces that connect communities through public displays. We then report on our initial work in this space, in particular on using public displays for creating what we call identity cognition – increasing the sense of being connected between community members occupying the same space. We have investigated two options for achieving identity cognition: (a) through content that originates from the environment, and (b) through content that originates from people. Content originating from the environment portrays information about a display’s surrounding. For this type of content, identity cognition is usually being achieved implicitly by stimulating the effect of ‘triangulation’, an effect where particularities of the physical space act as links between people. Content originating from people, on the other hand, explicitly achieves identity cognition by promoting community values through content that expresses the attitudes, beliefs, and ideas of individual community members. We have built and deployed two public display applications that support identity cognition using environmentally-sourced content and people-sourced content, respectively.