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.

In  Information Processing and Management

Publisher  Elsevier
Copyright © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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