Seattle's Strands Innovation team created a place based community technology for coffee shops. We studied it's impact on people's sense of attachment and community over time.

1. Measuring the Impact of Third Place
Attachment on the Adoption of a
Place-Based Community Technology
Shelly D. Farnham, Joseph F. McCarthy, Yagnesh Patel, Sameer Ahuja,
Daniel Norman, William R. Hazlewood, Josh Lind
CHI April 9, 2009

2. CoCollage
The Strands Community
Collage (CoCollage™)
promotes
awareness, interactions and
community
in third places where people
seek conversation and
connection.
Web site for sharing and
conversation
Large display showing
“Community Collage”

3. Third Places
Semi-public places away

from home (first places)
and work (second places)
People gather to enjoy

conversation with friends
and strangers
Facilitate community

development
frequent serendipitous

interactions
increased likelihood of

developing web of interpersonal
relationships

4. Existing “Technologies” for Community
Development in Third Places
Challenging to get to know who comes regularly over

time, what they are like, and start conversations

5. CoCollage: Expanding Impact of Place
web site
large display
synchronous
awareness and
conversation
asynchronous
in cafe
awareness, sharing and
conversation
in café or at home

6. CoCollage Features
Uploading
People and profiles Commenting, voting
Messaging
Shared items (photos & quotes) The big screen

7. Related Work
The Notification Collage [Greenberg &

Rounding, 2001] small work groups
The Plasma Poster Network [Churchill,

et al., 2003], professional content
EyeCanvas (Plasma Poster for a café

environment) [Churchill, et al., 2006]
BlueBoard [Russell, et al., 2002]

AutoSpeakerID, Ticket2Talk and

Neighborhood Window [McCarthy, et
al., 2004
C3 Collage [McCarthy, et al., 2008]

CityWall [Peltonen, et al., 2008]

EyeCanvas

8. Early Deployment Study
Procedure

Deploy to local coffee shop: Trabant,

working closely with owners
Observations, interviews and

questionnaire
Goals

develop a better understanding of

the psycho-social factors that would
impact adoption and use
get immediate feedback for

iteratively improving design
explore how best to measure place-

based community development for
future studies

9. Factors Expected to Influence Adoption
and Use
The size and activity of the existing

community
the extent to which the individual

has a desire to meet others
through the café
the individual’s existing levels of

psychological sense of community
and place attachment to the café

10. Measurements
Size and activity of community

Site observations (163 people, 7 hours)

Interviews with café owners

Questionnaire (69 people)

Psycho-social factors:

Psychological sense of community in place

Standardized measure (Wilkinson, 2007) adapted for place

“A feeling of fellowship runs deep between me and others at

Trabant”
“I feel loyal to the people at Trabant”

“My friendships and associations with others at Trabant mean a lot”

Desire to connect


11. Measurement Cont’d
Place attachment

Rosenbaum et al. in study of a suburban diner

People who experienced social support through

diner, developed place attachment – bond
between person and place
Place
Sense of
Attachment
Community
Used items that loaded highly on three factors:

Functional dependency: “I get more satisfaction out of Trabant than other

cafes”
Commitment: “I really care about the fate of Trabant”

Identification with self: “The success of Trabant is my success”


12. Size and Activity of Community
Owners are dedicated to developing a strong community, and have positive

attitude towards technology
Who:

Estimated about 400 “regulars” visited once or twice a week

48% male, 52% female, mean age = 29

23% students, 51% white collar/professional

Level of activity at cafe:

At any point in time, 17 people in the café

23 new people each hour

Stayed an average of 25 minutes each

Type of activities at cafe:

64% sat down to drink their coffee

38% came in with friends, chatted with each other

12% chatted with barista, 2 chatted across the table

Questionnaire: Chatting with friends (65%), reading (46%), working on laptop (39%)


13. Questionnaire: Existing Community
Size of their existing café network:

58% had at least one acquaintance in café, of those averaging 4.2 each

25% had at least one personal friend, of those averaging 2.8 each

Psycho social factors:

Satisfied with café (M = 5.6)*

Lukewarm in sense of community (M = 3.5)*

Place attachment on dependency (M = 5.4)* and commitment (M = 5.3)*

factors, but less so on identity (M = 3.4)*
Desire to connect with others

56% had some or more interest in meeting others at the café

suggests roughly half of regulars would want to join CoCollage

*on scale of 1 to 7, where 1 = not at all and 7 = extremely so

14. Raw Correlations
Sense of

community and
place attachment
strongly correlated
Bolded items are statistically significant at p < .05.

15. Raw Correlations
Of 69 who

completed
questionnaire, 24
also joined
CoCollage
Sense of

community, place
attachment, and
desire to connect
correlated with
whether joined
CoCollage
Bolded items are statistically significant at p < .05.

16. Predictors of Adoption
Simultaneous logistic regression, looks for unique
effects on binomial dependent variable:
Sense of community c2(1, N = 54) = 19.18, p < .001
Youth c2(1, N = 54) = 9.69, p < .002
Place attachment c2(3, N = 54) = 7.42, p < .06
Desire to connect c2(1, N = 54) = 5.66, p < .06
Gender c2(1, N = 54) = 3.61, p < .06
(N = 54 because if any missing variable, person excluded)

17. CoCollage Usage
82 users in first month

Primary usage:

 create a profile
 browse other profiles
 upload images
 View others’ images
Significant correlation between

desire to make friends and
 number of comments
(r = .43, p < .05)
 number of unique days they
have returned to the system
(r = .43, p < .05)
Percentage of users who engaged in each type of activity, with means

18. Conclusions
Within first month, decent adoption

82 out of roughly 400 regulars joined CoCollage in the first month

Questionnaire results shows that people who

a) are looking to connect with others
b) already have a psychological sense of community at the café
c) already feel place attachment to the café,
are more likely to join CoCollage and start conversations
Psychological sense of community for place and place

attachment are meaningful constructs in predicting
adoption of a place-based community technology

19. Questions?
Shelly Farnham

Research Consultant

WaggleLabs.com

shelly@wagglelabs.com

CoCollage

CoCollage.com

Joe McCarthy: mccarthy@strands.com

Learn more at Communities and Technologies in June,

presenting full paper with study of impact over time