Tethered or free to roam: the design space of limiting content access on community displays

Abstract

Many design decisions need to be made when creating situated public displays that aim to serve a community. One such decision concerns access to its contents: should users be able to access content remotely, e.g., via a web page, or should this be limited to users who are co-located with the display? A similar decision has to be made for community content upload: do posters need to be co-located with the display or can posts be made from any location? In other words, content display and creation can be 'tethered' to a display or it can be 'free to roam', i.e., accessible from anywhere. In this paper we analyze prior community display deployments in an attempt to explore this space and produce a taxonomy that highlights the inherent design choices. Furthermore, we discuss some of the reasons that may underlie these choices and identify opportunities for design.