Designing Interactive Public Displays for Neighborhood Scientizing

• In Event: Interests on the Move: Cultivating Interest Across Contexts

Abstract

Purpose
We present a design experiment (Cobb et al., 2013) focused on the development of interactive public displays, which were designed and deployed in neighborhoods. Our aim is to explore how such technologies can help local ecosystems to better connect and bridge science learning across the everyday life settings of youth.

Theoretical Framework
As researchers better understand how learning unfolds across different settings, time, social, cultural and material practices (Bell et al., 2012), we need to examine how to connect and bridge these resources as youth move through their communities. Our study explores how to support neighborhood actors to recognize youths’ everyday thinking about science - what we call scientizing (Clegg & Kolodner, 2014). In the Science Everywhere project, youth share their everyday science thinking via a social media app. We then designed interactive public displays that showcase their social media posts for the neighborhood. Our design study is informed by a robust history in Human-Computer Interaction and Community Informatics, to understand how such technologies can enhance community interaction (Carroll & Rosson, 2013; Memarovic, Langheinrich, & Alt, 2011). We examine the deployment of the public displays in two neighborhoods (Maryland and Washington), providing insight into how different residents and youth come to, interact with, and use the displays for neighborhood scientizing.

Methods and Data
We present a case study of our deployment of public displays over a 3 month period in 2017. In Maryland, the displays were installed in a local church and neighborhood middle school. In Washington, the displays were installed across a school and afterschool program settings. Data sources for our analysis include video data of neighborhood use of the displays in different settings, field notes of display usage, and interviews with parents and children in our neighborhood settings.

Findings
We document the emergent practices (Jurmu et al., 2016) that we observed as parents, children, and other neighborhood actors came to, interacted with, and made sense of the youth’s examples of scientizing on the public displays. Preliminary findings suggest that public displays of youth science thinking have unique affordances, raising awareness and noticing of how science is present in the everyday, sociomaterial practices of the neighborhood. This explicitly “place-based” connection can provide rich resources for diverse stakeholders to promote scientizing across neighborhood settings. However, we found in this iteration, that many neighborhood actors had questions about what to do with this awareness, or what roles they may play around this newfound noticing of science everywhere in the neighborhood. Thus, future iterations of our work will focus on fusing the social and cultural practices that neighborhood residents might enact as they coordinate around neighborhood public displays of learning.

Scholarly Significance
Our project explores - through design - how technologies infused in neighborhood infrastructure could enhance the facilitation of learning across settings for youth and the coordinating of local to better support youth. Our findings contribute to broader conversations as we imagine concepts such as smart cities, ecosystems of learning, and realize how community informatics and urban technological infrastructure play a role in these futures.

Authors

• June Ahn, New York University

• Tamara Lynnette Clegg, University of Maryland - College Park

• Jason Yip, University of Washington - Seattle

• Elizabeth Bonsignore, University of Maryland - College Park

• Lautaro Cabrera, University of Maryland - College Park

• Kelly Mills, University of Maryland - College Park