Engaging the Community Through Places: An User Study of People’s Festival Stories

Peoples lived experiences, stories, and memories about local places endow meaning to a community, which can play an important role in community engagement. We investigated the meaning of place through the lens of peoples memories of a local arts festival. We first designed, developed, and deployed a web application to collect peoples festival stories. We then developed our interview study based on 28 stories collected through the web app in order to generate rich conversations with 18 festival attendees. Our study identifies three parallel meanings that a place can hold based on the following types of festival attendees: experience seekers, nostalgia travelers, and familiar explorers. We further discuss how information technology can facilitate community engagement based on those parallel meanings of place.