Photo Screen: Shaping Perceptions of Residential Communities

TL;DR

Photo Screen is a simple, deployed digital tool that effectively enhances community engagement and perceptions in residential areas, with potential for deeper dialogue through photo tagging.

Contribution

This paper introduces Photo Screen, a novel situated photo-taking and viewing system that promotes community engagement and explores photo tagging for dialogue.

Findings

High engagement levels achieved with Photo Screen

Photo tagging enables meaningful resident-management dialogue

Residents positively shape community perceptions through playful activities

Abstract

Engaging residential communities with each other and with management remains a challenge. Housing providers deploy a variety of engagement strategies, some of which are supported by digital technologies. Their individual success is varied and integrated, multipronged approaches are seen to be more successful. As part of those, it is important to address people's perceptions of community and places, as well as any practical issues that they face. We present the design and evaluation of Photo Screen, a situated, public photo taking and viewing screen which was deployed in the context of a new flagship housing estate as part of a range of community engagement measures. In a new context, we confirm the high levels of engagement that can be achieved with this simple mechanism. We propose that photo 'tagging' might offer a second-stage engagement mechanism and enable meaningful dialogue between residents and management. Finally, we discuss how this playful activity allowed residents to positively shape the perception of their community.