Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
Interactive Community Bulletin Boards as Conversational Hubs
and Sites for Playful Visual Repartee
Elizabeth F. Churchill, Les Nelson
Palo Alto Research Center,
[email protected]; [email protected]
Abstract
In this paper we describe an interactive community
bulletin board installed within a neighborhood café and art
gallery, and the interactions that take place around and
through the board. The board features café information and
email list sign up, but also allows customers to create
publicly displayed, persistent, finger-drawn, digital
scribbles. In providing this community composition and
posting feature, our board differs from more commonly
available designs for one-way advertising of products.
Following analysis of the scribbles, and interviews with
scribble creators and readers, we offer a brief description
of the textual and visual play and repartee patrons engage
in. We discuss content forms posted to the board,
differentiating between solitary and collaborative play,
messaging, and conversational exchange. Our discussion
addresses open questions regarding the perspectives and
theories that can be applied to address this new form of
site-specific, public media exchange.
online community members to publish content in physical
public places, and for passers-by in those physical space to
read and contribute content (Figure 1). The displays are
therefore a means of providing leakage between the online
and offline “information neighbourhoods” [22][29]. In
previous work we have encouraged people’s presence in
physical and digital spaces by creating a flow between
online and offline public spaces through desktop, mobile
device [4] and interactive public board views. In these
installations, level of community membership offers
different levels of publishing and access control.
Personal
Online
Shared
Personal
.
1. Introduction
Increasingly public spaces have interactive digital displays
where people can gain access to information, review
merchandize, leave and send messages and/or play with
interactive games [17]. Public displays with aesthetically
appealing form factors have been introduced into work
([1][16][18][19][22][29]), leisure [8], and transitional,
urban spaces [22].
We have previously installed a number of interactive
public displays in organizations both in the United States
[5][6] and in Japan [32]. Such public displays present
opportunities for everyday information encountering [29],
and provide conversational “ice-breakers” or “tickets to
talk” [27] and the potential for establishment or discovery
of “common ground” [9]. They thus potentially spark
and/or enhance face-to-face communications and encourage
social networking beyond the display itself within
organizations and at events like conferences ([6], see also
[26]). In our view (and in most of our installations), the
display sits between physical and digital content-sharing
arrangements; that is, the networked displays are a place for
Public
Shared
Figure 1: We envision the role of large screen
displays as being windows between physical and
digital community participation.
In this paper, we describe the installation of an
interactive community board, the eyeCanvas, in a local café
and art gallery. Our design for the café/gallery includes
provision of an online community space for local artists,
performers and patrons centered around the café and its
activities. The online site is intended to support ongoing
conversations around past, current and future events,
augmenting and contributing to the vibrancy of the physical
space with an online, persistent (archival) place for patrons
to interact. The public interactive board in the café is
envisioned to be the window between the online and offline
community activities, carrying site-specific and site/activity
1530-1605/07 $20.00 © 2007 IEEE
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
related content posted by community members and
gallery/café owners. However, in this paper we focus only
on the board as a communication medium, reflecting on the
nature and content of the communications that we observed
occurring through and around it. In keeping with previous
reports, we know that large screen, public boards afford and
invite interactions that differ from personal displays (e..g.
[20]); here we consider not only the actions triggered by the
presence of the board, but also consider the content that was
created by patrons. Specifically we consider the role of the
text and drawings in people’s conversations, addressing
whether the images and text left on the board represent
persistent conversations, or whether they are residual
conversational artifacts - and we ponder the difference
between those concepts.
2. Communicative Acts and Conversations
There have been many theories posited as to the structure
and nature of conversation. For a communicative act to be
part of a conversation, there needs to be at least a dyad (that
is two people), some form of exchange (spoken or written)
which follows rules, where one “act” assumes, and is
followed by another act, a response. One definition states
“A conversation is an interaction sequence with a defined
beginning and end, turn-taking, and some sort of purpose or
set of goals. Conversations are also governed by rules; they
have structure and display coherence and sense.” [23].
Theories that have been often applied to understanding
conversations in the context of mediated communications
are Clark’s contribution theory that extends sender/receiver
models of communication to consider the collaborative
process of contributing to a common and mutual
understanding (the establishment of “common ground”) [9]
and conversational analytic approaches that focus on the
structure of turn-taking in conversations, and the ways in
which speech and context shape each other. While many
conversation analysis studies focus purely on transcribed
speech, of particular interest are micro-ethnographic
perspectives that takes into close consideration the broader
“semiotic resources” available to conversants – places,
things, bodies and so on [15][27] - which consider how
language, gesture, posture, and use of artifacts combine,
and how these semiotic resources contextualize each other
in creating meanings. We return to this notion in our later
analyses.
The notion of a persistent conversation is a
conversation that occurs through a medium whereby the
conversational acts or utterances are recorded. Persistent
conversations thus do not have the ephemerality of spoken
ones; they can be reviewed and re-represented. Two
entailments follow:
1. A conversation can take place in such a way that there
can be elapsed time between one act and another. The
interlocutors must make sense of how the current act
relates to the last and leads to the next. This is clearly
something that is not seamless in face-to-face speech
where long pauses denote the end of the conversation
or at least that the conversation is put on hold and an
explanation needed.
2. Others can pick up on a conversational thread, in some
sense the recorded artifact, and join in or start another
thread from it – a thread that need not include the
original interlocutors.
As Erickson says “persistence expands conversation
beyond those within earshot, rendering it accessible to those
in other places and at later times. Thus digital conversation
may be synchronous or asynchronous, and its audience
intimate or vast.” [9]. This stretching of the notion of
conversation points to the sense-making that that is needed
to achieve conversational coherence, such that potentially
disparate elements that may appear across different media
are interpreted as being parts of the same conversation to
the conversants. It also opens possibilities for new
conversants to step into a conversation with selfintroductory moves that would not work face-to-face.
3. The Canvas Gallery Café
From experience we know interactive poster installations
have varied adoption and use patterns, depending on
context. It is not possible to analyze or understand
interactions with a new technology in isolation from the
existing processes of interaction in a setting. We thus first
present a brief description of the café/gallery, its inhabitants
and existing communication patterns before describing the
installation and use of the eyeCanvas.
The Canvas Gallery Cafe is located in the Inner-Sunset
area of San Francisco. The surrounding neighbourhood
includes the Golden Gate Park, schools and many
restaurants; the local population is made up of families and
students. Public transport to the area is good. Open from
6am until midnight Sunday through Thursday and 6am till
2am Thursday through Saturday, the café offers a range of
foods, and alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. The space
has a very different atmosphere between day and evening;
in the day the café is a social meeting space for workers
who enjoy the free wifi and in the evenings events include
open-mike evenings, bands, musicians, DJs/VJs, private
parties and art openings. On average about 500 customers
per day pass through the cafe. A survey of 93 people over
several months revealed that people enjoy working at the
gallery, and many are regular customers. The age range is
wide with children and elderly visitors feeling comfortable
in the space. Most of the patrons have considerable
knowledge about the internet and many (over 30%) were
members of online communities of some form. Laptops are
commonly seen during the day, and a number of people use
headphones to create their own auditory space.
3.1. Spatial layout and Observations of Space Use
The café/gallery covers approximately 4000sq feet. Figure
2 shows the spatial layout of the café. A number of areas
exist within the café, including a main work area, fireplace
area, bar/stool area, eating tables area, square room area, art
gallery area and outside area.
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
eyeCanvas
Ar t
Ga l l e r y
Outside
Ou t si d e
Door
Sq u a r e
Ro o m
Deli
Deli
B
E
a
t
i
n
g
Main W o r k
Bar
area
Ba r / St o o l
Fi r e Pl a ce
Figure 2. The Canvas Gallery Café space is
arranged for work, leisure, and art. The starburst
is where we located the interactive screen
installation.
During morning hours most people are in the main work
area and in the square room, where power and tables are
also available. As the day goes on the fireplace area also
fills up. The main work area empties between 5:00 and 6:00
PM. In the evening there are more people around the bar
than in the day. From 7.30 PM a noticeable change in
clientele and mode of engagement with others is
discernible. What during the day has been the rather quiet
main work area becomes a lively performance/event space
with audience chairs and tables, or a cleared space for
dance events. In the summer months the outside patio space
is also filled with people during the day.
In order to determine the best location for the installation
of the community poster board, we carried out observations
of people’s movement through the space. Several weeks of
observation study took place during the months of
December and January, and again in June, July and August.
We counted the number of customers in the various
sections at 30 minute intervals between 8:30 AM and 8:00
PM. We noted movements between the different areas and
places where people clustered for conversation or stand
waiting to be served.
Our analysis revealed the most foot traffic in the gallery
passes between the front door and the square room; the food
service counters are located here. People spend time here
gathering napkins, tailoring their drinks (with milk, sugar,
etc), and browsing fliers and postcards. We observed many
impromptu conversations between strangers as well as
between friends in this location. We therefore decided to
locate the interactive public display at this point (shown as
a star in Figure 2). This location is also visible from the
bulk of main work area and as people exit.
4. The eyeCanvas Interactive Display and
Social Content Distribution System
The eyeCanvas is a large screen interactive bulletin board.
The underlying infrastructure is based on a flexible
information storage and distribution system, described
elsewhere as the Plasma Poster Network [5][6]. The
interactive components of the interface and the
editing/authoring tools were designed specifically for the
café location. Areas in the interface to the eyeCanvas were
created for the café brand materials, the title of the posting,
the main content viewing window, the posting thumbnail
selection of items that will be shown in sequence, selection
carousel for customer created scribbles and the interactive
elements for sending comments, finding more information
and joining the email distribution list (Figure 3). One posted
item (URL) at a time is displayed; items cycle
automatically every 60 seconds unless someone touches the
display which automatically pauses the slideshow. Along
the bottom of the display is a carousel of available content.
This carousel moves to the left as the content in the main
window is changed. Users can spin the carousel with a
horizontal flick gesture to see what items are available for
viewing in the content and the scribble galleries. By
pressing on one of these the item will be displayed in the
main window.
Branding
Posting
Title
Main
Posted
Content
Posting
Thumbnails
Scribbles
Thumbnails
Controls
Figure 3. The eyeCanvas interface has areas of
interaction for the different content types shown.
Café content can be posted via a web form or email.
Content posted by the gallery owners includes the
café/gallery web pages and menus, plus content related to
regular and upcoming artists who show at the gallery.
Although designed and implemented, the café community
site was not deployed when the data presented in this paper
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
were gathered. Therefore all content in the main cycling
display of the eyeCanvas was generated or requested by the
café owners or the gallery curator. There are two ways in
which café patrons can enter information: 1. a soft keyboard
to allow people to type their email address to sign up to the
café distribution list, and 2. the “scribble” interface for
leaving comments.
Regarding the first kind of input, Figure 4 shows the
eyeCanvas installed and in use. The soft keyboard shown in
the Figure is accessed by clicking on the “join our list”
button at the bottom right of the interface. Regarding the
second
feature,
the
eyeCanvas
included
a
scribble/fingerpaint authoring tool and the ability to post
items created in this way directly to the display itself (see
Figure 5). Therefore patrons could leave hand drawn
comments that are emailed to the Café management, but
these comments are also posted into and made visible in the
interface as a second pane of selectable content. The
scribbles that are created are displayed along the bottom of
the interface in Figure 3. None of these features requires a
sign-on or login authentication before use. These scribbles
are the center of our analysis in this paper.
eyeCanvas being used regularly at the café/gallery, and
people's responses to it were largely positive. The sign-up
rate for the email distribution list was 131 email addresses
in 5 months. More detail regarding general use of the
eyeCanvas use has been reported elsewhere [8].
To ascertain how people felt about and used the
interactive board, we interviewed 2 of the 3 café/gallery
owners, workers in the café and gallery areas (6 people) and
customers before and after the installation of the interactive
display – we interviewed both regulars and visitors (15
people before and 23 people after installation). Fourteen
people were interviewed in the evening (3 before the
installation and 11 after the installation). Interviews were
semi-structured and lasted between 30 minutes and 2 hours.
We talked to those observed creating scribbles, and
followed up with known or identifiable scribblers.
5. Scribbling in public with digital doodles
The scribble interface is shown in Figure 5 as it was being
used to create finger-art drawing to be posted. In terms of
eyeCanvas use, interviews and observations as well as
content and interaction data analysis revealed that by far the
most popular feature was this digital doodle or scribbling.
5.1 Scribble creation: general comments
Figure 4. Using the eyeCanvas interface; looking
at the soft keyboard for typed text entry. The
keyboard is available for sending emails and
comments to the café owners.
We analyzed the number and type of finger scribbles people
created on the eyeCanvas for display. Our analysis began a
short time after installation in order to avoid novelty effects.
A total of 1466 scribbles were posted from October 8th to
December 17th. Most scribbles were created in the
evenings. There were 10-20 scribble posts on any given
day. After an initial peak in interest, the posting trend
flattened to ~12 posts per day in mid-November, with
spikes in interest every few weeks. With the exception of
scribbles that were considered “unsuitable” due to
potentially offensive content, all scribbles were persistent
and could be reviewed by scrolling through the carousel
interface. Notably this interface did not scale well to the
large number of scribbles (as was noted by one of the
scribblers); a number of redesigns were tested to
accommodate this problem; further discussion of this does
not fit within the scope of this paper.
Following installation of the eyeCanvas, use analyses
included gathering and analyzing click data from touchscreen interactions, surveys, interviews and observations.
Unlike some previously reported cases (note comments in
[1]) and [20]) adoption by inhabitants of the communal
space was spontaneous, enthusiastic and creative. 392,164
touches of the eyeCanvas screen were recorded over 4
months of use, with weekly usage trends indicating more
use as the week goes on, peaking on Saturdays. Overall
usage grew quickly after introduction, but tailing off
somewhat near the holidays – from a peak of 45998 touch
events on the screen during the week of 20 October, to a
low of 15007 on the week of 15 December, with an average
of 25386 touches per week (sd=3709). We observed the
Figure 5. Collaborative drawing the “scribble”
interface on the eyeCanvas.
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
5.2 Play and display, utterances, conversations and
interjections
virtual exchange because of the persistent
spatial/environmental nature of the visual display.
and
Our analyses of scribbling are drawn from three data
sources: observations of individual and collaborative
scribble creation; interviews and conversations with
scribblers; and content and time stamp (i.e., creation time)
analysis of scribbles. Scribbles varied enormously in
production style, from furtive, self conscious creation to
artistic flourish where the scribble is as much a residual
artifact of the performance of creation as an entity in and of
itself. On a number of occasions we observed people
collaborating on the construction of scribble art (Figure 5).
Figure 6. Example of a hostile post. Less than 1%
of postings could be considered hostile and/or
sexually explicit. Posted 8 Jan, 18:18.
5.3 On the Nature of Scribbled Content.
Scribbles varied enormously as shown in the figures below
(e.g., Figure 9). There was a clear difference between the
nature of the scribbled content and that left in the
suggestion book, which was the only other public posting
place in the café/gallery [8]. Less than one percent of the
scribbles contained contact information such as phone
number and email addresses on the display. 50% of
postings were drawings. Only 5% of the messages were
suggestions/comments.
Out
of
those,
3%
of
suggestions/comments are about the display, not about the
café. There was a correlation between time and
inappropriateness of posts for the café setting; sexually
explicit posts (text and drawing) and offensive content were
created during night time and early morning - between
10.30pm and 2am. No inappropriate post has been posted in
the morning and afternoon before 5 pm, undoubtedly in part
because of the public nature of creating a scribble; people
would be witnessed creating inappropriate material.
Perhaps people were more disinhibited due to alcohol
consumption in the evenings when such material was
posted. Also, the space was more filled with people then,
and thus some cover was offered - only those standing close
could see what was being drawn or written. These factors
clearly point to the active role of the social setting in
influencing the ways in which the technology was used.
Posted 2 Dec, 19:14
Posted 16 Oct, 21:04
Posted 16 Oct., 18:42
Posted 28 Oct, 19:11
Figure 7. Information seeking and providing
(announcements, queries, and self promotion).
Posted 18 Oct 22:37
Posted 16 Oct 19:32
Posted 21 Oct 12:19
Posted 24 Oct 22:04
Posted 30 Oct 22:17
5.3 A typology of scribbles
Extending Burnett’s typology of information exchange in
virtual communities [2], we identified the following
categories: hostile postings (spam, flames, derogatory and
sexual content, e.g., Figure 6) and individual/collaborative
positive interactive postings. The latter category is further
subdivided into information seeking/providing (e.g.,
announcements, queries, interest and self promotion, Figure
7) or not information seeking or providing (e.g., gossip,
pleasantries, play, support Figure 8). We also observed in
the non-information seeking/providing category instances
of graffiti-like “tagging”, identity displays (the “I was here”
or “hello mum” phenomena), and local memes. There were
also instances of playful utterances directed at people or at
the room in general, (“get out of my chair”). Undoubtedly
these are more prominent in this café setting than in online
Figure 8. Non-information seeking postings:
Pleasantries such as general and holiday
greetings, Identity tagging, and Iconic images.
The eyeCanvas lent itself well to forms of collaborative
social play. In our observations and when carrying out our
initial scribble analysis of information exchange, we
observed ‘response’ artifacts being created as one person
created a scribble, followed by others sometime later when
the first scribbler was absent creating new scribbles “in
genre” (e.g., a face image to follow a face image). People
also reported conversational exchanges that were “played
out” on the eyeCanvas, verbally and through other media.
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
Ev e n t s
M essa g e
Cu r r e n t Ev e n t s
Ad
Ar t
Su g g e s t i o n s
Figure 9. Scribble postings expressed a range of topics of interest to café/gallery patrons.
Linking between postings will be discussed in the next
section, where we begin to formulate our approach to
thinking about the eyeCanvas as a medium for
communication and conversational acts.
5.3 Threaded exchanges
In this section we present several scenarios that illustrate
conversational engagements with the eyeCanvas. Notably,
when interviewing scribblers and readers alike, we were
often invited to go to the eyeCanvas shown scribbles as the
story of their creation was told. These acts of orientation
and illustration demonstrated the role that these persistent
artifacts took in communication, in this instance used as
illustrative story-telling artifacts for us.
Scenario 1: Iconic performance talk. A number of
instances of this kind were related to us.
Matt and Jennifer are seated by the bar. This is their
third date. They talk of romance and relationships, and of
dating. Matt gets up walks over to the eyeCanvas, and
opens the scribble application. He turns to check Jennifer is
watching. Puzzled, she watches as he draws a heart with an
arrow through it. Finishing the drawing, he turns and looks
coyly at her, and then returns to his seat, kissing her on the
cheek as he sits down. The conversation about romance and
dating continues, with that which was unspeakable having
been spoken iconically – with a heart and arrow.
Figure 10. Iconic performance talk. Posted 13
Nov., 00:29
In this example, the action was methodically designed to
avoid speaking that which the illustrator felt he could not
say, the heart offering iconic grounding to the unspoken
meaning (Figure 10). We observed, and were told about a
number of occasions in which people drew things they
could not fully express or which they felt were “cheesy” or
“cheeky”. In these cases, the performer was in conversation
with the onlooker(s), and the production was part of the
conversation. The drawings appear to be a form of
utterance, a representation of something that for social
reasons (embarrassment, humor, punctuated effect) the
illustrators prefer not to speak out loud. The simplicity of
the drawing, and its status as a culturally known symbol is
part of its power; it stands alone and can be read by others
as well as those for whom this was part of the conversation.
The intentionality of its production at a particular point in
the conversation points to its role as a illustrative, iconic
communication but perhaps distinguishes this form of
methodical performance from that in ordinary “mundane”
conversation [28]. Its production however, sits well within
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
broader notions of embodied discourse, and perspectives
that draw on semiotics [3][15][21].
We note that another form of iconic conversation was
also observed in which a drawing was something to be
achieved together, and the product was the subject of the
conversation. In this instance, two people stood next to each
other. One created a scribble, and the other took the
opportunity to respond in genre, and to take the text as
something to comment upon, addressing the textual
comment written for a general audience. The concurrent
verbal exchange was about the interactive board and the
testing of its capabilities, and not about the content of what
was being authored; these comments represented a form of
additional, non-speech contribution, a sub-conversation
played out concurrently with the spoken conversation. The
whole exchange can only be understood by observing the
movement in space, body postures and gestures, and the
combination of acts through these multiple modalities.
Scenario 2: Illustrating talk. In some instances we
observed dyads illustrating their conversation using the
board – a conversation in the scenario that is presented that
was in itself sparked by the presence of the board as a
medium for drawing.
Jeffrey and Tracy are discussing perspective. Jeffrey
moves over the eyeCanvas, and begins to draw. Tracy
watches him, and comes over to stand by him. She leans
over and begins to add something to his drawing. Realizing
the eyeCanvas only supports input from one person at a
time, they take turns constructing a drawing together,
talking as they do so. Halfway through the drawing, Tracy
picks up a coffee stirrer and adds some refinements to the
drawing. They discuss the way in which this improves their
drawing. Together they draw an up-side down stove and
pan, one where gravity is taking its toll and the other side
where it is not.
Posted 16 Nov, 23:07
Posted 16 Nov, 23:02
Figure 11. Collaborative production, illustrating
talk
In this case (Figure 11), the drawing began as an
illustration, but became a thing to be discussed in its
production. And unlike the examples in scenario 1, where
what was left was perfectly understandable to readers later,
in this instance, what was left was something that was an
artifact that could not be easily read by others.
Scenario 3: Asynchronous talk. In some cases, rather
than synchronous co-production of conversational meaning
on and through the board, the board was used as a place to
leave a comment as part of a conversational thread that had
begun much earlier.
Following a discussion about snowboarding, and about
the eyeCanvas, Jane and John look up a snowboarding
video on the web that illustrates a point made in an earlier
conversation. Returning to the eyeCanvas, they leave a
comment on the board, making reference to the video
discussed earlier, even though most of the people involved
in the conversation are no longer present. Elaine checks the
scribble carousel on her return to the gallery a few days
later and scrolls through the scribbles. She finds two notes
left for her referring to the video. Later in the day Jane and
John call Elaine, and their conversation continues.
Posted 11 Nov, 10:25
Posted 11 Nov, 10:25
Figure 12. Asynchronous talk
This communication works in part because the
conversants know that the scribbles (Figure 12). will be
reviewed – they have seen the scribbles being reviewed
previously. On being questioned, they admitted they were
“pretty sure” the scribble would be read. This illustrates the
importance of understanding the rhythm or pattern of
reading and the likelihood of the message being received.
Locational, temporal and practice related information are all
used to determine where and when the message is left and
how long it is assumed that it will take before it is picked
up. We note however, the context for reading the comments
are not present, so onlookers seeing these scribbles later are
not able to unravel the significance of the scribble.
Scenario 4: Design talk. Some scribbles were part of an
ongoing asynchronous conversation, where the board was
again used as a placeholder. The role of the board in this
example was again that the scribbler knew the practices of
the others, and the board thus became a suitable
communication medium. These images are part of an
ongoing conversation with the designers of the board.
In all the instances shown in Figure 13, we the board
designers and implementers followed up on these postings
with deeper conversations about improvements to the
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
board. The scribbles resulted from earlier comments and led
to more comments, a conversation that wove between face
to face encounters and email sharing.
boards? We take this discussion further in the next section
of the paper.
6. Discussion
Posted 26 Oct, 16:28
Posted 24 Nov, 20:27
Posted 24 Nov, 20:47
Figure 13. Ongoing design conversations
Scenario 5: Mimic play. A familiar form of exchange
play was seen in posts that people reported as being created
in response to earlier posts. The best example of this is
shown in Figure 14, where an artist whose work was always
signed with an “M” is first teased with a “Not M” and then
shown being eaten by a pac-man character.
Posted
30
Posted
Nov, 00:28
24 Oct, 20:34
Figure 14: Mimic play
Posted
30
Nov, 00:33
These exchanges are multi-modal weaves between
media that people perform to establish and continue threads
of playful information exchange. They are described by
their creators as “conversational”. This notion of
conversation differs from analysts requirements of what it
takes for something to be a conversation. Thus we wish to
consider two questions: Firstly, what would need to pertain
for the exchanges to be considered conversational in terms
we covered earlier in Section 2 of this paper? And,
secondly, should we as designers reconsider our notions of
conversation and turn elsewhere for a deeper understanding
of communicative practice in considering environmental
communications like those supported by the interactive
In considering the way in which the interactive display
and more specifically the scribble application was adopted
and used in the gallery, we posed the questions: Do the
persistent scribble art and text comments constitute a form
of conversation between patrons, between visitors and the
designers and patrons and the proprietors? Or are they
merely “tickets-to-talk” to use Harvey Sacks’ term,
meaning the occasion or cue for conversations in passing
encounters ([27]), where the conversations only occur
around or are cued by the technology? Are they simply
different forms of displays such as magnet-held drawings
on a refrigerator or graffiti drawn on a wall? The scribbles
are persistent and they are clearly communicative acts, but
are these persistent conversations? Certainly the boards
sparked conversation, and people insisted in interviews that
their repartee through the scribbles were like conversations.
But are these akin to comments, smileys and images that
are daily sent around in email which people consider
conversational? And if so does our consideration of what is
conversational need to change to accommodate these visual
utterances? Or are these through some intrinsic measure not
conversational? And what would the boards need to be like
to support conversations? Or are the boards inherently not
somewhere where persistent conversations can occur and
why? We consider the interactive boards to be
conversational systems, but are we just being too loose in
our use of the term ‘conversational’? Or are we uncovering
a new form of conversationality?
Ultimately we decided that although scribble exchanges
were not conversations in terms of strict linguistic
definitions, visual and textual conversational threads could
well emerge based on the short sequences we analysed. We
also wish to argue for a broader notion of communication
and conversation as giving more analytic purchase and
being more reflective of what we observed taking place.
Inherently not conversation or an interface issue?
First, to satisfy one notion of conversation would require
a redesign of the interface. Specifically, we believe we
would need to offer the ability to differently order the
scribbles to create linked clusters.
From our earlier brief treatment of different views of
conversation, “common ground” was clearly established in
the exchanges we saw – from the scribbler and reader
perspectives in the scenarios we presented, everyone was
clear what the referents were, and how acts related to
previous acts and in some instances invited new acts.
Conversational structures of exchange are also observed to
some extent in the turn-taking that can be observed. The
assumption that utterances or conversational contributions
be context relevant or context maintaining is satisfied - that
is, that they be based on what was previously uttered and in
some sense lead to what is uttered next. Certainly, in our
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
analysis of scribbles we found stable patterns of
identifiable, structural features, and some “utterances” that
appeared to map to conversational elements – coordinative
comments, standard greetings, retorts and exclamations.
However we saw only limited sequences of contributions,
and limited context maintenance. Contiguity, as would be
present in turn-taking in spoken and in some textual
conversation, was not a cue to a contribution being a
referent to an earlier scribble-utterance. The nature of the
persistence allowed to scribbles in the eyeCanvas interface,
namely a fixed, scrolling, linear sequence, is constraining in
this regard. Specifically we did not offer a way for people
to build on scribbles and thus create layered contributions.
Neither could scribbles be reorganized in the carousel to
create contingency pairs: it was not possible to select a
scribble and create a conversational fork from it – without
this facility, comments could not be associated with
previous content effectively. Thus the scribbles although
persistent were “islanded” into being ephemeral from a
conversational standpoint with no hope of creating the
adjacency that is required to signal a conversation has been
initiated. The equivalent would be leaving a comment on a
generic blog page, not on the entry to which you wish to
comment. Only the highly initiated or otherwise informed
would make the connection and realize a dialogue had
begun.
Can picture-based exchanges be conversational?
We have learned from studies of online discourse and
from observations of spaces like Flickr that photographic
conversations are highly possible. Forms of conversational
thread are ever emerging – images posted in response to
other images; sequences of images annotating other images
through comment streams; images that combine iconic and
textual forms to create a complex message that is responded
to by others and that lead to a flow of rich information
exchange. Further, we know that temporal and physical
proximity are not necessary for these artifact-embodied,
asynchronous conversations to take place. Recent
exhibitions of mail-art have conceived of such collaborative
contributions as a “visual conversation”. Gilbert and Yun
discuss their mail art project where 26 collages were sent
between artists who each contributed to the collages and
then packaged them and sent them back [14]. The process
continued until an artist declared them finished. The point
of these anecdotes is to illustrate that visual conversation
feels very much like conversations to the participants, that
structure can be imposed and turn taking be messy
(photosharing sites) or neat (the mail art example), and that
persistence allows the conversation to have its own
temporal rhythm. But we also want to point out that
conversation-like exchanges could occur on the palette of
the scribbles on the interactive board even if they did not in
our initial installation. So what was it about the scribbles
such that short retorts and visual jokes were the most
elaborate conversational exchanges that we observed? We
believe that this was in much part due not to the visual
nature of most of the “utterances”, but again to the
technology itself not enabling the possibility of more
complex chains and thus conversations to emerge.
A broader perspective?
We wish to briefly consider and honor the scribblers
feelings that they were engaged in conversation. Taking for
a moment that a conversation occurs in the bodies and
minds of the beholders, we wish to conclude this paper with
consideration of a broader notion of communication and
conversation as part of communication. Birdwhistell states
“A human being is not a black box, with one orifice for
emitting a chunk of stuff called communication and another
for receiving it. And, at the same time, communication is
not simply the sum of the bits of information, which pass
between two people in a given period of time.” [3]
Garfinkel takes a much broader and, consequently, less
formal approach to communicative acts [13]. His main
concern is with the interpretative, “situated” processes that
underlie these acts, be they verbal or nonverbal.
Sociolinguist Frederick Erickson’s work also offers a
broader temporal and embodied perspective on talk in
social life [10]. Thus we have begun to elaborate an
analysis that is broader, and approaches that draws more
from approaches that emphasize broader semiotic resources
[15], ethnographic studies of communication [21], and
theories of visual communication [31].
7. Summary and Future work
In this paper we have described our public space
(café/gallery) installation of an interactive community
bulletin board with a persistent scribble creation feature.
We described the adoption of this feature, which was by far
the most popular interaction element of the installation. We
presented some of the items that were produced by the
café/gallery patrons and laid out the beginnings of our
analysis of the communicative aspects of these scribbles.
The scribbles are not simply single contributor personal
comments; they are public property, and being so visible,
are available for comment and present for all to engage
with. Scribbles allow a “user-driven” form of playful
exchange, rather than enforcing our pre-planned notions of
playful interaction.
Our analysis has led us to conclude that the lone scribble
and chains of related scribbles are communicative but are
do not entirely satisfy the conditions for being in themselves
persistent conversational threads. However, some are
clearly part of conversations that occur with them as
essential elements. Our analysis suggests that this is not
owing to the visual nature of many scribbles, and the
potential for conversation-like threading is present. The
technology - although it allows persistence – does not allow
the interlinking or arranging of elements to create sufficient
adjacency to signal conversational threading. This is a
common problem with technologies that support
asynchronous contributions, but only support one
conversation space and that without threading. This has
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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
been noted in studies of text chat spaces where mental work
is done by conversants to maintain coherence in multithreaded chat. Our design thus led to short exchanges, and
conversations with residual, persistent artifacts, but not
conversations that were observably carried on solely on the
boards. Rather, the conversations moved through this
medium, the images and notes being part of an ongoing
conversation, some elements of which persist elsewhere and
some of which are ephemeral.
Finally, we would like to broaden our perspective to
further our understanding of the mechanics of
communication and conversation through persistent visual
and textual content exchange.
8. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Gary Hsieh and members
of the FX Palo Alto Laboratory for their part in this project.
We would also like to thank the owners and patrons of the
Canvas Gallery for their participation.
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