Better by Design
Working together to understand shared interfaces
The Open University has been jointly awarded an EPSRC grant which will investigate the benefits of new shareable technologies. Professor Yvonne Rogers, Dr Sheep Dalton and Dr Paul Marshall from the OU’s Department of Computing will be working in collaboration with the Psychology Department at the University of Sussex on the ‘ShareIT’ Project. The one million pound grant, starting in October 2008, will last for 3 years and will support an interdisciplinary team working with schools and businesses.
Technology now provides us with new ways of enabling people to collaborate in small groups. Shareable interfaces are combinations of displays and devices that allow several people in the same place to have their own input (e.g. multiple mice controlling the same display) and to interact at the same time on a shared task (e.g. electronic whiteboards). Input is not restricted to mice or keyboards: users might point, gesture, or use special pens or tokens to interact with a shared display. Many benefits have been claimed about how such technologies can support co-located groups working together but little research conducted to support them. The researchers working on ShareIT are concerned with empirically investigating the benefits and disadvantages of this new generation of technologies. For example, they will look at whether a tabletop surface with people sitting around it is more democratic than a vertical screen where one person has privileged access to control.
Another line of research is to look at how multi-touch surfaces are used by different user groups. For example, the research will determine whether multi-user games can help autistic children participate more fully.
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