Lessons learnt from collaboratively creating maps on a touch table

Abstract

While touch tables have improved support for creative, co-located, collaborative tasks, the very act of studying what groups create on such tables (and how) remains non-trivially difficult. We developed an experimental tool to study what map designs would be created by pairs of users collaborating around a touch table, however to paraphrase the German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke: "no experimental tool survives contact with the table". While running our experiments, we made a series of observations around issues with table interaction, and our initial expectations on how the users would be able to interact with the tool. In this paper, we contribute these observations to assist other researchers considering undertaking a similar course of action.