Abstract
Despite the promise of social media to bring the world closer together, large segments of local communities, globally, remain misunderstood by or invisible to mainstream society. This problem is attributed, in large part, to digital media’s ascendancy over physical, public space as the locus for civic discourse—the loss of informal and structured encounters between members of communities there. This chapter presents our development and early evaluation of a novel cyber-physical platform, communIT, for community building across diverse local community groups. Deployed in underused public spaces, communIT is an origami-like, folding, robotic surface of billboard scale, with embedded peripherals, that changes form in response to group needs for group co-creation and sharing of media. By collaboratively making and sharing media with communIT, local groups can tell stories, share experiences and aspirations, and advocate within the larger community. Such civic discourse promises the potential to transform personal identity and self-representation, community awareness and responsibility, and wider social relationships with policy-makers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Anderson R (1992) Social impacts of computing: codes of professional ethics. Soc Sci Comput Rev 10(2):453–469
Brandt E et al (2012) Tools and techniques. In: Simonsen, Roberts (eds) Routledge international handbook of participatory design
Cuba L, Hummon DM (1993) A place to call home: identification with dwelling, community, and region. Sociol Quart 34:111–131
de Aguiar et al (2016) The networked, robotic home + furniture suite: a distributed, assistive technology facilitating aging in place. In: 2016 IEEE international conference on automation science and engineering (CASE). https://doi.org/10.1109/coase.2016.7743522
De Waal M (2011) The urban culture of sentient cities: from an internet of things to a public sphere of things. In: Shepard M (ed.) Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture, and the future of urban space. The Architect League of New York, The MIT Press, pp 190–195
Dublon G, Portocarrero E (2014) Listentree: audio-haptic display in the natural environment. In: Proceedings 20th international conference on auditory display (ICAD–2014)
Easterling K (2011) The action is the form. In: Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture, and the future of urban space. In: Shepard M (ed) The Architect League of New York. The MIT Press
Fisher P, Gerlach F, Acuna J, Pollack D, Schäfer I, Trautmann J, Hornecker E (2014) Movable, Kick-/Flickable light fragments eliciting ad-hoc interaction in public space. In: Proceedings of the international symposium on pervasive displays, pp 50–55 (June 2014)
Fortin C, Hennessy K, Sweeney H (2014) Roles of an interactive media façade in a digital agora. In: Proceedings of the international symposium on pervasive displays, pp 7–12 (June 2014)
Giuliani MV (2003) Theory of attachment and place attachment. In: Bonnes M, Lee T, Bonaiuto M (eds) Psychological theories for environmental issues. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp 137–170
Grønbæk K, Kortbek K, Møller C, Nielsen J, Stenfeldt L (2012) Designing playful interactive installations for urban environments—the swingscape experience. In: Nijholt A, Romão T, Reidsma D (eds) Advances in computer entertainment SE—16. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 230–245. http://doi.org/10.1007/978–3-642-34292-9_16
Grönvall E, Kinch S, Petersen MG, Rasmussen MK (2014) Causing commotion with a shape-changing bench: experiencing shape-changing interfaces in use. In: Proceedings of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp 2559–2568 (May 2014)
Lofland J et al (2006) Analyzing social settings a guide to qualitative observation and analysis. Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, Belmont, CA
McCullough M (2004) Digital ground—architecture, pervasive computing and environmental knowing. MIT Press, p 118
McLuhan M (1994) Understanding media. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Mesh GS, Manor O (1998) Social ties, environmental perception, and local attachment. Environ Behav 30:227–245
Mitchel M (1999) E-topia: Urban life, Jim—but not as we know it. Chapter 1, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Mokhtar TH, Green KE, Walker ID, Threatt T, Murali VN, Apte A, Mohan SK (2010) Embedding robotics in civic monuments for an information world. In: CHI ‘10 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (CHI EA ‘10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 3859–3864. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753846.1754069
Odom W, Zimmerman J, Davidoff S, Forlizzi J, Dey AK, Lee MK (2012) A fieldwork of the future with user enactments. In Proceedings of the designing interactive systems conference (DIS ‘12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 338–347. https://doi.org/10.1145/2317956.2318008
Oldenburg R (1999) The Great Good Place: cafes, caffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of a community. Marlowe & Company
Oungrinis K (2006) CommunITations: paradigms for designing CommunITable spaces. Harvard Design School, Cambridge, MA
Pask G (1969) The architectural relevance of cybernetics. Arch Des 39.9: 494–496. Trivedi D et al (2008) “Soft robotics: Biological inspiration, state of the art, and future research. Appl Bionics Biomech 5.3:99–117
Peltonen P, Kurvinen E, Salovaara A et al (2008) It’s Mine, Don’T Touch!: interactions at a large multi-touch display in a city centre. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp 1285–1294. http://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357255
Pinch T (2010) The invisible technologies of goffman’s sociology from the merry-go-round to the internet. Technology and culture, vol 51, Number 2, Apr 2010, pp 409–424
Proshansky H et al (1978) The city and the self-identity. Environ Behav 10:147–169
Proshansky H et al (1983) Place-identity: physical world socialization of the self. J Environ Psychol 3:5783
Riley RB (1992) Attachment to ordinary landscape. In: Altman I, Low SM (eds) Place attachment. Plenum, New Yorl, pp 13–35
Rogers Y, Marshall P (2017) Research in the wild. [San Rafael, California]: Morgan & Claypool. https://doi.org/10.2200/S00764ED1V01Y201703HCI037
Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2008) Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign, 4(1):5–18 (Mar 2008)
Sassen S (2011) Unsettling topographic representation. In: Shepard M (ed) Sentient city: ubiquitous computing, architecture, and the future of urban space. The Architect League of New York, The MIT Press, pp 192–198
Scannell LD, Gifford R (2010) Defining place attachment: a tripartite organization framework. J Environ Psychol 30:1–10
Simitch A, Warkere V (2014) The language of architecture—26 principles every architect should know. Rockport, USA
Twigger-Ross et al (1996) Place and identity processes. J Environ Psychol 16, 205
Vyzoviti S (2003) Folding architecture. BIS, Amsterdam
Williams DR, Vaske JJ (2003) The measurement of place attachment: validity and generalizability of a psychometric approach. Forest Sci 49(6):830–840
Zeisel J (1984) Inquiry by design tools for environment-behavior research. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
de Aguiar, C.H.A., Green, K.E. (2020). CommunIT Building. In: McCrickard, D.S., Jones, M., Stelter, T.L. (eds) HCI Outdoors: Theory, Design, Methods and Applications. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45289-6_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45289-6_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45288-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45289-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)