PosterBoard - GR1 - Project Proposal and Analysis

Scenario

Amanda a graduate student in the EECS program is organizing an event – a South Asian cultural night, to be specific. After creating a poster, she decides to put it up on PosterBoard’s electronic poster boards.

Five minutes later, John is walking past a poster board. He’s hurrying to his lab not because he has a meeting but because hurrying is a way of life at MIT. In any case, he interested in knowing if anything has changed in the poster board since he walked past it the day before also the electronic poster board catches his attention. So, in a few seconds, he waves his MIT id over the contactless reader and Amanda’s poster is highlighted. So he stops and takes a closer look. It looks like an interesting event and he takes a picture of the QR code and the event is added to his calendar and he has the option to share the poster on facebook or tweet about it. He’s not done yet because the beardless man in the poster could do with a nice moustache (It’s November Movember, after all) so he finger paints one in and adds a speech bubble that has the woman in the poster complimenting the moustache. This would certainly be a good thing to share with his friends. So he takes another picture of the new QR code and his ‘artwork’ has been shared on facebook.

Before he steps off the poster, he observes some other posters around the one he’s been looking at that have a slight glow around them so he decides to check them out. They are all for ‘related’ events and activities; a South Asian dance group, MISTI India and a Pakistani Coffee Hour at the Ashdown house. He’s not interested in any of these so he continues hurrying to his lab.

A day before the event, Amanda needs to get some sense of the level of interest in the cultural night. So she logs into the website and is able to see how many people focused on the poster, how many people added it to their calendar, what annotations and comments were made on the poster and all this in relation to how many people interacted with the board in that time. She now has a better idea of the level of interest and heads to Shalimar food and spices to order the ‘right’ amount of food.

After the event, the poster expires and disappears from all poster boards.