K:info: An Architecture for Smart Billboards for Informal Public Spaces

Public gathering spaces such as lounges, elevator lobbies, and hallways are places where informal social encounters occur most frequently in the workplace. In addition to serving as the crossroads for day-to-day activities, these spaces harbor a relaxed social atmosphere, where people feel naturally inclined to gather and talk casually about anything that may be on their minds. As a result, these spaces encourage social connections to be made, shared interests to be discovered, and, perhaps most importantly, informal collaborations to form among people who may have otherwise never have realized the opportunity to work together. Despite the importance of such social encounters and informal collaborations to knowledge-driven organizations (Cohen & Prusak, 2001), these spaces still largely lack any information infrastructure. This inspired the Ki/o project (Van Kleek, 2003) to attempt to design such an information infrastructure, consisting of an intelligent kiosk platform and software architecture to be integrated into these spaces.