Designing for neighborhoods
Claudia López, Rosta Farzan · 2014
Many local information systems struggle to remain viable over time. The low volume of new content that is generated each day in a local community places burdens on the sustainability of such systems. To shed light on designing for local communities, we investigated the content, design and significance of paper-based bulletin boards as sustainable local information systems. We found that their viability is built upon several design strategies such as announcing information about local services and small-scale events; a dual strategy of supporting sense of community and information discovery; and using a flexible, but strategic definition of the communities' geographical boundaries. Future work will investigate these design strategies in online settings.