Territoriality in collaborative tabletop workspaces (original) (raw)

Traditional Tabletop Work Practices 2 . 1 Tabletop Territoriality

2006

Within the digital tabletop research community there is a growing understanding of the fundamental interaction behaviors that digital tabletop workspaces should enable in order to facilitate effective collaboration. Some of these understandings have theoretical basis such as tabletop territoriality, which is grounded in the theoretical understandings of human territoriality. From this developing theoretical understanding, design guidelines have emerged and prototype systems have been created. The next step in this research progression is to use these theories as the basis from which to analyze interaction data from digital tabletop use to understand if the existing tabletop interfaces and interaction techniques support these fundamental interaction behaviors. This paper describes one such analysis, in which the data from an observational study of a tabletop interface component, called storage bins, is examined to determine how well it supports tabletop territoriality, as well as ano...

Territory-based interaction techniques for tabletop collaboration

2003

For over hundreds of years people have been gathering around tables for the purposes of eating, conversing, working, and entertaining. Co-located collaboration researchers exploring alternatives to traditional "desktop" computers are beginning to exploit the benefits that this familiar environment appears to have for facilitating social interactions. Studies of tabletop collaboration involving traditional media (e.g., paper and pens) show collaborators often partition the tabletop workspace into various areas (e.g., personal and group). Just as partitioning of our physical spaces helps to maintain social order, such territorial behaviour on a tabletop workspace appears to be an important mechanism for organizing collaborative activities. This research further investigates tabletop territoriality, through new observational studies, as well as development of territory-based interaction techniques for tabletop collaboration. Initial results from these observational studies are presented, along with a proposed test-bed environment for exploring territory-based interaction techniques.

Theory of tabletop territoriality

2010

This chapter discusses empirical and theoretical investigations of the practice of tabletop territoriality in order to understand how to exploit such social interaction practices that people have developed over years of collaborating in traditional tabletop environments in the design of digital tabletops. These investigations reveal that collaborators at traditional tabletop workspaces use three types of tabletop territories to help coordinate their interactions within the shared tabletop workspace: personal, group, and storage territories. These tabletop territories facilitate collaborative interactions on a table by providing commonly understood social protocols that help people to share a tabletop workspace by clarifying which regions are available for individual or joint task work, to delegate task responsibilities, to coordinate access to task resources by providing lightweight mechanisms to reserve and share task resources, and to organize the task resources in the workspace.

Exploring Casual Tabletop Interactions

2004

Although there are many different types of tabletop displays in the literature, there are very few fundamentals known about what tabletop interfaces should look like or should behave. In order to obtain a better understanding of these questions, it seemed appropriate to back up a little from the interface design, and look at tasks and environments that we would like to support. Thus, several observational studies of traditional tabletop collaboration were undertaken to inform the design of collaborative tabletop interfaces. To get a broad understanding of tabletop ...

A user study explores the utility of storage bins on tabletop display collaboration

T raditional tables have long been the preferred work environment for many collaboration tasks such as planning, scheduling, brainstorming, design, and layout activities. Unfortunately, collaborating at current digital tabletop displays is often awkward and frustrating. This might, in part, stem from a lack of suitable tools for organizing and sharing information. The ability to store resource items anywhere in the workspace and move them around can be critical for coordinating task and group interactions on a table. However, existing casual storage techniques for digital workspaces only provide access to stored items at the periphery of the workspace, potentially compromising collaborative interactions at a digital tabletop display. To facilitate this storage behavior in a digital tabletop workspace, we developed the storage bin mobile storage mechanism, which combines the space-preserving features of existing peripheral storage mechanisms with the capability to relocate stored items in the workspace.