Understanding social interactions for the design of tangible user interfaces

Abstract

Several research works talk about benefits of Tangible User Interfaces in Collaborative work. However, it is still convenient to understand how people interact with tangibles medias in order to design Tangible Interfaces to support Collaboration. In the CSCW domain, we study collaborative activities in order to identify Social Interactions that enable people achieve common goals. Our interest is the development of Tangible User Interfaces to support Collaboration. So, as first step we analysed a group of users in a collaborative task, that allowed us to identify on working space the social interactions between users who used pieces of paper as tangible medias. Then we describe the process of identifying social interactions using the MARS model and introduce some challenges for the design and implementation of Tangible User Interfaces that supports collaborative work.