The Never-Ending Live Graffiti Social Experiment

Group interaction on networked digital whiteboards to create an unstructured social network

Ariel Molina-Rueda, David Flores, Mallinalli Gabarrn
Art, Design and Architecture Department
Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla
Puebla, Mexico
ariel@edis.mx, {victor.flores, adrianamallinalli.gabarron}@iberopuebla.mx
Abstract Current social networks are focused in the individual,
are very strict in content formatting and are focused in a
broadcaster style (one-to-many) content delivery. We propose a
very different approach by using semi anonymous broadcasting
where groups generate content by collective behavior (many-tomany) and the product is a reflection of the group, not of the
individual. Digital whiteboards are used to allow for a
modernized, interconnected and live version of graffiti, this
enables us to create a simple tool to enable an unstructured
information flow. Preliminary analysis has shown how joyful
interaction can be, and how radically our collective social
behavior shifts depending on very subtle changes. This work
presents the analysis, the concept and the initial implementation
of the tool.
Keywordsinteractive surfaces, social experimentation,
collaborative work, interaction design, social networks

I.

INTRODUCTION

As a matter of fact, humans depend on effective

communication to be able to survive in society. Recently,
social networks and other communication channels allow for
effective communication between distant individuals rendering
distances a mostly irrelevant impediment. Communication
based on text, images and video is still the preferred method,
and different social networks define specific structures
(templates) in which this communication is made.
This document describes a different concept and the
possibility to develop a mechanism based on digital
whiteboards. This concept, as far as we know, has not been
explored in current literature or in commercial endeavors. We
propose a system where current mechanisms are sidelined and
replaced with digital whiteboards allowing for live social
communication between individuals remotely connected.
We start by allowing individuals to generate and share
messages on a digital canvas. This canvas is geographically
disperse, but connected by a networked backbone. Inspired by
the unconventional and semi-anonymous graffiti we believe
this interconnected digital canvas can change the way people
communicate by leaving almost anonymous messages for
everyone to read and interpret. As drawings evolve, this canvas
will not be a reflection of a single individual, but a colorful
reflection of the thoughts, rants and ideas of the group or
neighborhood of users near the canvas. These group
expressions are clearly defined by the current social trends,
local and international news, and can be thought like a facet of

the new Internet of Things (IoT) [1], several authors mention in

current literature. Old messages are never deleted; they are
overwritten by new messages and slowly fade as time passes,
leaving the shared graffiti whiteboards as a never ending social
experiment.
The fundamental difference between current social
experiments (either commercial or academic) and our
experiment is the way we allow groups to share information to
other groups, opposed to the single-to-many relationship
currently applied. Our electronic whiteboard network breaks
this pattern, allowing groups interact with groups, where
freedom of expression and creativity is the main rule. This
experiments goal is to expand this kind of interaction and
connect in real time all sketches with other graffiti boards to
enforce social interaction.
Since its humble beginnings Gundry & Metes [2] noted the
huge the impact of networks, they noticed networks expand
well beyond the simple publisher-reader duality. They clearly
noticed the impact of it as a promoter of message interchange
and noted a huge increase in communication, both between
individuals and between groups. Sproull and Kiesler [3] wrote
about information technology too, they describe the idea about
inventors giving value to technologies in terms of efficiency
and productivity and about enterprises measuring theses same
properties. But recently, this technology is, in fact, about
interaction, work processes and social behavior. Clearly,
technologies like these are shaped along the way they are used
by people.
Huge efforts in the contemporary research community have
been put into finding new ways to interact using new
technologies; a recent example is to do it over interactive
surfaces. These surfaces have the potential to close the digital
divide described by Pinkett [4], gathering the community closer
by leveraging ease of use and their potential as a
communication mean. By making interactive surfaces easy to
use and accessible to everyone we can fulfill one of the basic
points noted by Nielsen [5] about interactive systems: usability.
In our case the inherent simplicity will also help to foster the
graffiti boards acceptance among the general public. And
Dave Evans, has already [6] written about IoT applications and
their need to get more acceptance and bring a tangible value of
the application to peoples lives. For Evans, IoT represents the
next evolution of the Internet. And objects like the one
described in this experiment have the potential to change social
behaviors.

Figure 1. First blackboard installed on our campus. A

II.
A.

THE EXPERIMENT ON TRADITIONAL BLACKBOARDS

Group behavior on a traditional blackboard

As a communication experiment and a mechanism to

reduce stress and avoid vandalism in benches and tables in our
campus, authorities have installed a shared blackboard, based
on traditional chalk, see Fig. 1. This event motivated people to
share ideas, post messages, news, and to create a colorful and,
sometimes humoristic, trend of information.

We decided to monitor the blackboard in order to track the

evolution of its drawings. Our findings indicate there is very
little vandalism, and people tend to complement and enrich
ideas shared by other authors. People tend to grow, modify and
twist ideas, but they also tend to show respect to some
messages interpreted as serious or helpful. At the beginning of
the day, this chalk based blackboard is erased by authorities,
but only if they are really crowded as people tend to avoid
clearing it. Every day, the chalk-based blackboard shows a
unique shared image of all the authors involved. Every day
unique images were captured.
After the huge success of the experiment, another
blackboard was installed in a different area of the campus. It
was successful too, but messages were totally different, these
two chalk-based blackboards had different personalities, see
Fig. 2. For our experiment this was a bit unexpected as the
population using both of them is the same, it was clear that
environmental conditions and the subtle difference in the
involved individuals was the driving factor between the radical
differences in the drawings.
Photographic samples were taken between both
blackboards so we could gather insights about social
characteristics generating the differences in drawings and
general. In the analysis we found that the first board presented
brief humoristic messages while the second one had higher
degree complexity draws and long well thought messages with
politic contents so we imply that one of the principal

Figure 2. Second blackboard installed on our campus. Different drawings

give different personality to this other blackboard. The style and complexity is
different and in our studies

Differences are the psychological maturity of the neighborhood

of users near the canvas.
Every specific cultural group can be identified by collective
values and behaviors related their geographical zone, social
situation and historic moment. Those factors shape and define
the thoughts, behavior and perception bias of their
environment. This affects the expression of the group members
and, also, we can consider social media users as message and
information providers.
The final research provided the insights to create a shared
digital whiteboard, the Live Graffiti to allow users to
communicate and share a single digital canvas. Our proposal is
to share in real time what users draw and sketch. The simplicity
of the idea is also its deepest complication, to allow a single
common drawing surface to be synchronized across multiple
displays. Another challenge was to make it very easy to use so
anybody can attempt to draw onto it. On the way to do this, we
tried to join the informality of graffiti, with the omnipresence
of a real time digital shared drawing surface.
On the next section we describe implementation details
about the Live Graffiti, and how it can boost social behavior.
III.

THE NEVER ENDING LIVE GRAFITTI

A. Canvas description.
We propose group (many-to-many) interaction mechanism,
evolving from the traditional broadcaster (one-to-many), our
digital whiteboards can provide this kind on interaction based
on previous research of traditional chalk-based blackboards.

Figure 4. Internals of the Live Graffiti can. Left: The spray can is shown
without its protective cover, Right: The spray can internals. Logic is
implemented via an Arduino UNO and communication is done wirelessly
using an XBee adaptor.

Figure 3. The can prototype, the user was able to select color by using the
rotating base. A spray can was selected because it was natural for users to hold
it and feel free to tag over the Live Graffiti surface.

The canvas is brought to its simplest form, a flat vertical

surface where users can draw and sketch in a free manner, no
tools are provided just a digital spray bottle.
B. Implementation
The interactive Live Graffiti is implemented by using a
projector to display images in a retro-projection screen. A
digital spray can was made to mimick a traditional spray can
used by graffiti artists. As we only have a single can for a
single Live Graffiti panel we chose to implement a color
selector by means of a rotating knob. The knob changes four
RGB LEDS to show the color that it prints over the board. The
color can be chosen between thirty different colors by rotating
the bottom of the can. The can has an electronic system based
on an Arduino UNO which controls the color through a
potentiometer at the bottom of the can, it also has an infrared
LED over the top of the can witch is activated by a button on
the can. Communication is via a wireless interface
implemented using XBee adaptors.

Figure 5. Interconecting several whiteboards. Bottom: A single whiteboard

is made by the computer detecting the position and color of the spray can, and
a database conection for uploading data. Other whiteboards can work in near
realtime by connecting to the database and downloading stroke data to be
synchronized to their own screens.

C. Connecting several Live Graffiti panels

The data of each line is send to an SQL server where it can
be retrieved by other Live Graffiti panels connected to the
network. Local data is uploaded to the central sever and remote
data is grabbed from the same server in order to display what
other Live Graffiti boards are receiving. Refer to Figure 5 to
know more about the system.

IV.

DISCUSSION

After initial tests, we discovered that the interactive Live

Graffiti system enforces a change of behavior of groups that are
commonly limited to the natural neighborhood mainstream.
The boards provided them with new ways to interact with
others groups which had different perceptions, and socio
cultural statuses. Traditional isolation was perturbed, and this
was per se, a very interesting phenomenon to observe.

A. Future and ongoing work

This experiment is still in progress and a deep analysis of the
social behavior of the groups is still to be done. The
preliminary experiment on traditional boards was conducted
along several months, and this new experiment should be in
place for several more months in order to gather enough
information.

With this new way to interact each group is receiving new

information that in other ways were unable to receive. This had
a severe impact in their behavior.
There is still a lot of work to do, because we are still in
preliminary phase where we need to gather more data in order
to fully understand what happens and to which degree the
current social interaction is perturbed.
V.

CONCLUSIONS

We presented a deep analysis on traditional blackboards; we

detected huge differences in the behavior of groups of users
when subtle differences were in place. This was interesting
enough to pose the question about what would happen if these
disconnected boards were, in fact, connected. We developed
the concept of social disruption by connecting these boards in
what we called The Never-Ending Live Graffiti boards, an
experiment is still in place to detect how social behavior is
affected by this new virtual connection of a normally isolated
object.

REFERENCES
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[2]

[3]
[4]

[5]
[6]

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