What is the Text Wall?
A digital interface. A shared experience. A message board. A physical space. A family portrait.
Part family conversation, part interactive wall paper, the text wall allows family members to submit messages to a shared space.
How Does It Work?
The text wall takes advantage of the relationship between Twitter and Flash to create a visual artifact of these text messages. Family members send text messages to an assigned number (via Twitter) which in turn is sent to a server. Because Twitter is an open source application, we were able to make our own application (in Flash) that assigned a color, size, and path of animation to each text sent to the server. Using a projector and a Mac-Mini that connected to the server's IP address, the sent texts were projected onto the wall inside the home.
Leveraging Our Prior Work
The text wall was tested by two families as part of the larger Super Studio studio. Many of the texts displayed expected behaviors such as using the wall as a message board, for storytelling, as a public journal, for self-promotion, to display emoticons and for public complaining.
The Text Wall was initially tested in-studio. Thus, we were able to anticipate many of the behaviors of the text wall based on our own use.
Examples of expected texting behavior by our families.
The text wall initially started off as a shared memory space of photos, text, and audio built into a couch was revised to being a text-only wall space in which family members utilize their cell phones and text message in to add entries to the wall. We worked to address the issues of form, color, and content for the wall space, and how these variables changed the way that the project would function in the home. We wanted to create a new shared conversation space in the home allowing all voices to be heard equally. We also wanted to gain a new understanding of streaming media as not just something detached and coming in from the outside, but something that they, themselves can create. Our focus, in a larger sense, focused on the creation of an alternative family portrait, authored and curated by the family members themselves.
Examples of unexpected texting behavior.
There were, however, many unexpected outcomes. These behavior included using the Text Wall in real-time to comment on television programs as well as giving the wall anthropomorphic qualities such as a name and a personal history. Texting the wall also became a game where families members would text to be first or last so their messages would remain on the board. Finally, family members stayed up late a night to watch the wall "clear" at midnight and rose early to be the first to text it in the morning. Yet the most profound lesson was how "sticky" the wall became. In both cases, family members texted the wall even after it had been removed from the home.