Meredith Ringel Morris, Danyel Fisher, and Daniel Wigdor
5 November 2009
Collaborative information seeking often takes place in co-located settings; such opportunities may be planned (business colleagues meeting in a conference room or students working
together in a library) or spontaneous (family members gathered in their living room or
friends meeting at a café). Surface computing technologies (i.e., interactive tabletops) hold
great potential for enhancing collaborative information seeking activities. Such devices
provide engaging direct manipulation interactions, facilitate awareness of collaborators’
activities, and afford spatial organization of content. However, current tabletop technologies
also present several challenges that creators of collaborative information seeking system
must account for in their designs. In this article, we explore the design space for
collaborative search systems on interactive tabletops, discussing the benefits and challenges
of creating search applications for these devices. We discuss how features of our
tabletop search prototypes TeamSearch, FourBySix Search, Cambiera, and WeSearch, illustrate
different aspects of this design space.
|Published in||Information Processing and Management|
Copyright © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.