Theory of Tabletop Territoriality
Date
2010
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer
Abstract
This chapter discusses empirical and theoretical investigations of the
practice of tabletop territoriality in order to understand how to exploit such social
interaction practices that people have developed over years of collaborating in traditional
tabletop environments in the design of digital tabletops. These investigations
reveal that collaborators at traditional tabletop workspaces use three types of
tabletop territories to help coordinate their interactions within the shared tabletop
workspace: personal, group, and storage territories. These tabletop territories facilitate
collaborative interactions on a table by providing commonly understood social
protocols that help people to share a tabletop workspace by clarifying which
regions are available for individual or joint task work, to delegate task responsibilities,
to coordinate access to task resources by providing lightweight mechanisms
to reserve and share task resources, and to organize the task resources in the workspace.