Ambient Informatics in Urban Cafés
Joseph F. McCarthy Abstract:The Community Collage (CoCollage) is designed to cultivate community in a café, a quintessential "third place", by bringing the richness of online social software into a physical community space. The system shows photos and quotes uploaded to a web site by café patrons and staff on a large computer display in the café, providing a new channel for awareness, interactions and relationships among people there. Much of the research into urban informatics focuses on digital representations of artifacts, processes and systems in a city. CoCollage offers a window into digital representations of city dwellers in the community-oriented places in which they regularly dwell. |