http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/events/ Eva Hornecker
701 Claremont Tower
I will discuss recent research conducted with my collaborators at the Pervasive Interaction Lab at the OU on collaboration and tabletop interaction. Our research investigates interfaces that support co- located and co-present interaction. We propose ‘shareable interfaces’as a more inclusive term focusing on the kinds of activity to be supported rather than on the design of the interface per se (tangible, tabletop, large displays etc.). It is still a research question how best to support group interaction around interactive tabletops, and the effects of different configurations of input devices and setups. Our study has two parts, investigating the effect of touch interaction versus mice on awareness, and the effects of touch versus mice as well as the number of access points (one/multiple mice/touch) on equity of participation. We found higher levels of both positive and negative measures of awareness in the touch condition. A subsequent qualitative analysis indicated that the interactions in the touch condition were more fluid and integrated. Overall, our findings indicate that interactive touch surfaces facilitate collaboration through enabling more fluid work. Our analysis highlights the importance of allowing groups to handle interferences as they occur as a design imperative (in contrast to avoiding interference). In the second part of our study we found an effect on 'manual' participation of both touch and multi-input as well as strong effects on the subjective perception of over- and under-participation. Qualitative analysis suggests that effects are bigger for heterogenous groups than for groups of similar status and talkativeness. Eva Hornecker is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK.In previous lives, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Pervasive Interaction Lab at the Open University and the University of Sussex (working on the Equator project) in the UK, and an Acting Lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and at the TU Vienna in Austria. She wrote a PhD theses on 'Tangible Interfaces as a medium for collaboration support' at the University of Bremen. Her research interests concern multimodal, tangible and embodied interaction, user research, design methods, and qualitative research methods for understanding user interaction with ‘beyond the desktop’technologies. ]]> http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/events/colloquia/#c230 Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:10:57 UTC