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Rethinking 'multi-user': an in-the-wild study of how groups approach a walk-up-and-use tabletop interface

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Multi-touch tabletops have been much heralded as an innovative technology that can facilitate new ways of group working. However, there is little evidence of these materialising outside of research lab settings. We present the findings of a 5-week in-the-wild study examining how a shared planning application - designed to run on a walk-up-and-use tabletop - was used when placed in a tourist information centre. We describe how groups approached, congregated and interacted with it and the social interactions that took place - noting how they were quite different from research findings describing the ways groups work around a tabletop in lab settings. We discuss the implications of such situated group work for designing collaborative tabletop applications for use in public settings.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      May 2011
      3530 pages
      ISBN:9781450302289
      DOI:10.1145/1978942
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      Published: 07 May 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. in situ
      2. in-the-wild
      3. public
      4. tabletop
      5. walk-up-and-use

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