Social and privacy aspects of a system for collaborative public expression

In this paper, we are concerned with how a real-world social situation shapes the interaction with a novel technology that combines collocated mobile phone and public display use for groups of people. We present a user study of a system that allows collaborative creation and sharing of comic strips on public displays in a social setting such as a pub or café. The system utilizes mobile phones and public displays for shared collaborative expression between collocated users. A user study spanning three sessions was conducted in real-world settings: one during the social event following a seminar on games research and two in a bar on a regular weekday evening. We present and discuss our findings with respect to how the larger social situation and location influenced the interaction with the system, the collaboration between participants of a team, how people moved between different roles (i.e., actor, spectator and bystander), and the privacy issues it evoked from participants.