Fighting for control: children's embodied interactions when using physical and digital representations

ABSTRACT

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.

REFERENCES

• 1: Paul Dietz , Darren Leigh, DiamondTouch: a multi-user touch technology, Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, November 11-14, 2001, Orlando, Florida [doi>10.1145/502348.502389]
• 2: Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001
• 3: Ylva Fernaeus , Jakob Tholander, Designing for programming as joint performances among groups of children, Interacting with Computers, v.18 n.5, p.1012-1031, September, 2006 [doi>10.1016/j.intcom.2006.05.004]
• 4: Ylva Fernaeus , Jakob Tholander, Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1124772.1124839]
• 5: Green, V. A. and Rechis, R. Children's cooperative and competitive interactions in limited resource situations: A literature review. Applied Developmental Psychology, 27, 42--59.
• 6: Eva Hornecker, A design theme for tangible interaction: embodied facilitation, Proceedings of the ninth conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, p.23-43, September 18-22, 2005, Paris, France
• 7: Meredith Ringel Morris , Kathy Ryall , Chia Shen , Clifton Forlines , Frederic Vernier, Beyond "social protocols": multi-user coordination policies for co-located groupware, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 06-10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA [doi>10.1145/1031607.1031648]
• 8: Rogers, Y., Lim, Y-K., Hazlewood, W., Marshall, P. (2009) Equal Opportunities: Do shareable interfaces promote more group participation than single user displays? To appear in Human-Computer Interaction.
• 9: Stacey D. Scott , Karen D. Grant , Regan L. Mandryk, System guidelines for co-located, collaborative work on a tabletop display, Proceedings of the eighth conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, p.159-178, September 14-18, 2003, Helsinki, Finland
• 10: Hideyuki Suzuki , Hiroshi Kato, Interaction-level support for collaborative learning: AlgoBlock—an open programming language, The first international conference on Computer support for collaborative learning, p.349-355, October 1995, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, Indiana, United States

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
children, collaboration, embodied interaction