The Context, Content and Community (C3) Collage

The Context, Content and Community (C3) Collage is an example of a socio-technical ecosystem of social media, mobile phones and large displays, providing a platform through which coworkers can develop stronger relationships with each other. This proactive display application senses nearby people via Bluetooth phones, and responds by incrementally adding photos associated with those people to an ambient collage shown on a large screen.

Unlike some of our earlier applications, which had been purely proactive, the C3 Collage uses touch-screen computers, adding an interactive dimension to the user experience. Although the content of the display was generated proactively, users could move photos as well as vote on them by touching the screen on which they were shown.

A survey conducted four weeks after the system was deployed revealed that nearly everyone – both those who created accounts and those did not – believed that the system had a positive impact on the personal relationships within the workplace. However, subsequent semi-structured interviews suggested that there were still some shortcomings, e.g., the votes cast via the touch-screen were not reflected on the web profile page or otherwise communicated to the person who had shared the photos.

Publications, Presentations and Videos

The Context, Content & Community Collage: Sharing Personal Digital Media in the Physical Workplace
Joseph F. McCarthy, Ben Congleton and F. Maxwell Harper
ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008), 8-12 November 2008, San Diego, CA
[Abstract] [Paper (PDF)] [Slides (@SlideShare)]