Computational Alternatives Vignettes for Place- and Activity-Centered Digital Services in Public Libraries

Abstract

We investigate how to design community technologies for public events. We do so with a focus on technologies that give rise to new forms of participation and knowledge coproduction in public libraries. Specifically, we deployed a digital service at a major public library during its four-week creative workshop series. The system offered an alternative way for people to work together as a community, to go beyond achieving individual goals, and to contribute to the achievement of public goals (e.g., building community bookshelves). We report on how the system has reconfigured physical spaces and afforded new social practices in the library. We propose Computational Alternatives as a fruitful approach for gaining situated, nuanced insights into a technology's possible adoption. We offer key insights in the form of computational alternatives vignettes -grounded stories that encapsulate sociotechnical implications of technology, pointing to plausible alternative futures.

A design space for event-centric displays in public libraries

“…that are otherwise ignored (Kanis et al, 2011;Kukka et al, 2018) (see Figure 1 for examples). More recently, Yoo et al (2020b) proposed a system to document library activities and make them visible through public displays in the library. There is currently no convention or standards on how to communicate about events in libraries.…”

Between Principle and Pragmatism: Reflections on Prototyping Computational Media with Webstrates

“…In the PLACED project [24,65,66], we collaborated with public libraries in Sweden, France, and Denmark on how to digitally support and document events that happened in the libraries. This included events such as book readings, crafts workshops, talks, courses, and more.…”

“…Whether software served as a tool or as the object of a computing activity became a phenomenon of use instead of being dictated by the software itself. Over the years, Webstrates has been used to explore these software qualities in the contexts of design [12,30], scientific work [50], public libraries [24,66], video editing [36], programming assignments [9], data analytics [1,27,46], collaborative affinity diagramming [40], and video conferencing [25].…”

Webstrates, Codestrates v2, and Varv: A Software Stack for Computational Media

“…Throughout the years, we and others have used Webstrates, Codestrates v1, and Codestrates v2 to explore computational media in a variety of projects including collaborative data visualization [1,8,12], public libraries [6,15], collaborative video editing [10], collaborative programming assignments [5], computational laboratory notebooks [13], collaborative writing tools [3], affinity diagramming [11], and hybrid meetings [7].…”