PROVIDENCE – Campus bulletin boards long have been a staple at colleges and universities across the country. But they’re getting a new twist this fall at the Rhode Island School of Design, which has just installed seven large-screen digital bulletin boards that can be edited by any member of the RISD community.

The screens will display more than the usual details on film screenings and bake sales for worthy causes – they are also open to “musings, artwork, photographs, and messages posted by anyone on campus,” according to the school. RISD says the screens offer the campus community “a highly visual and spontaneous method of connecting with one another.”

The digital screens are the latest in a string of early initiatives from RISD’s new president, John Maeda, a former associate director of MIT’s Media Lab. Maeda was inaugurated last Friday.

The digital bulletin-board system was developed through a partnership between RISD’s Interactive Media team, Samsung Electronics America Inc., and a New York-based tech design firm, Potion, that is run by some of Maeda’s former students from the Media Lab.

“Rather than looking like the ubiquitous electronic advertising seen in most airports and subway stations, Potion devised a dynamic, high-energy zooming interface built on Apple’s motion-savvy Quartz Composer,” the school said in a news release.

“At regular intervals, the community-generated content appears to fall onto the screen in a jumble, rearranges itself, send specific items to the foreground and remain in constant motion until it’s recycled back into the mix of new information at the next periodic update,” the release said.

Samsung donated seven of its latest 52-inch LCD HDTVs, a gift worth $25,000, to RISD for the system. (Maeda is a member of Samsung’s advisory board for North America.) Mac users on campus can download a screensaver that will display the new bulletin boards’ content on their own computers.

“A priority as I enter my first year at RISD is to make communications more open, which is a key element for any organization to grow and flourish,” Maeda said in a statement. The first step, he said, was launching blogs, including our.risd.edu, which is available to the public.

“This community signage is another means for students, faculty, staff – anyone with a RISD account – to express themselves,” he continued, referring to the digital bulletin boards. “I thank Samsung for their generous gift and commitment to innovation, which has allowed us to bring this concept to fruition, and Potion for developing a one-of-a-kind system, built to fit RISD’s needs and designed to inspire the creative community to share and connect in a new way.”

The HDTVs have been installed at The Met refectory, the Woods-Gerry Gallery, the lobbies of the Center for Integrative Technologies, the Design Center, 161 South Main, The Roger Mandle Living and Learning Center at 15 Westminster and the new Chace Center.

Rhode Island School of Design is a private arts and design school founded in Providence in 1877. Today, it has a staff of about 750, including 350 faculty and curators, and a student enrollment of about 2,200. To learn more about the school, visit www.risd.edu.