Sharing Online Photos via Proactive Displays 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, that runs on large LCD touchcomputers installed in eight locations throughout a research laboratory. This proactive display application senses nearby people via Bluetooth phones, and responds by incrementally adding Flickr photos associated with those people to an ambient collage shown on the screen. This paper will highlight the motivations, goals, design and early deployment experiences with this proactive display application.