Doing Community: Co-construction of Meaning and Use with Interactive Information Kiosks

One of the challenges for ubiquitous computing is to design systems that can be both understood by their users and at the same time understand the users themselves. As information and its meaning becomes more associated with the communities that provide and use it, how will it be possible to build effective systems for these users? We have been examining these issues via ethnographic analysis of the information and community supporting system that we have developed and employed at conference events. This paper presents initial analysis and suggests greater focus on the interaction between members of micro-communities of users in future ubicomp research.