Investigating Tabletop Territoriality in Digital Tabletop Workspaces

Abstract

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 another known beneficial interaction behavior, casual piling of workspace content.