The context, content & community collage: sharing personal digital media in the physical workplace

Online social media services enable people to share many aspects of their personal interests and passions with friends, acquaintances and strangers. We are investigating how the display of social media in a workplace context can improve relationships among collocated colleagues. We have designed, developed and deployed the Context, Content and Community Collage, which runs on large LCD touchscreen computers installed in eight locations throughout a research laboratory. This proactive display application senses nearby people via Bluetooth phones, and responds by incrementally adding photos associated with those people to an ambient collage shown on the screen. This paper describes the motivations, goals, design and impact of the system, highlighting the ways the system has increased interactions and improved personal relationships among coworkers at the deployment site. We also look at how the creation of a shared physical window into online media has affected the use of that media.