Interactive Community Bulletin Boards as Conversational Hubs and Sites for Playful Visual Repartee

In this paper we describe an interactive community bulletin board installed within a neighborhood cafe and art gallery, and the interactions that take place around and through the board. The board features cafe 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