Interactions - March/April 2012

ZOIL, available via zoil.codeplex.com. We also thank the German Research Foundation DFG for funding this research project (Grant No. RE 1843/3-1).

researchers and practitioners working in the field of interaction design already have access to the kind of technology we employ in our systems and certainly can make more use of it for improving their own work practice.

However, one of the crucial lessons we learned is that these tools must be designed very carefully, since too much digital functionality may conflict with established work practices and workflows. When we eventually put our systems to the test and compare them with physical practice, we realize that we always have to make compromises—trade-offs between what we aimed to preserve of the material and spatial characteristics and what we had to give up in the favor of using technology to augment these activities with digital power. We therefore argue that these decisions have to be designed in a structured and thoughtful way.

During the design of our sys-
tems, we followed a reality-based

ENDNOTES:

1. Khan, A., Matejka, J., Fitzmaurice, G., Kurtenbach, G., Burtnyk, N., Buxton, B.: Toward the digital design studio: Large display explorations. Human-Computer Interaction 24, 1 (2009), 9-47. 2. Jacucci, G., Wagner, I. Performative roles of materiality for collective creativity. Proc. of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition. ACM, New York, 2007, 73-82.

3. Jacob, R.J.K., Girouard, A., Hirshfield, L.M., Horn, M.S., Shaer, O., Solovey, E. T., Zigelbaum, J. Reality-based interaction: A framework for post-WIMP interfaces. Proc. of the 26th annual ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2008, 201-210.

4. Geyer, F., Pfeil, U., Budzinski, J., Höchtl, A., Reiterer, H. Affinity Table—A hybrid surface for supporting affinity diagramming. Proc. of the 13th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011, 477-484.

5. Geyer, F., Reiterer, H. A cross-device spatial workspace supporting artifact-mediated collaboration in interaction design. Proc. of the 28th Annual ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts. ACM, New York, 2010, 3787-3792.

6. Watanabe, N., Washida, M., Igarashi, T. Bubble
clusters: An interface for manipulating spatial
aggregation of graphical objects. Proc. of the 20th
annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software
and Technology. ACM, New York, 2007, 173-182.
7. Geyer, F., Pfeil, U., Höchtl, A., Budzinski, J.,
Reiterer, H. Designing reality-based interfaces
for creative group work. Proc. of the 8th ACM
Conference on Creativity and Cognition. ACM, New
York, 2011, 165-174.

approach, which allowed for an in-depth understanding of the relations between physical practices and digital technology [ 7]. Our methodology is based on intensive situated observations and qualitative analyses of real-world practice. These investigations allow for identifying potential benefits and drawbacks of the social, physical, bodily, and environmental aspects, such as material artifacts and spatial work surfaces. Based on explicit trade-off decisions, we further map these characteristics iteratively onto our design space. By following this controlled approach, we have shaped a methodology for addressing these trade-off decisions in a structured way.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Florian Geyer is a Ph.D. student in
the Human-Computer Interaction
Group at the University of
Konstanz, Germany. In his
research he explores novel
approaches for supporting collab-
orative design activities and creativity methods with
computation-augmented design studio settings.
His work was recently awarded with an Honorable
Mention for Best Contribution to Creative
Communication (ACM Creativity & Cognition Award
2011).

Acknowledgements We thank our collaborators Ulrike Pfeil, Jochen Budzinski, Anita Höchtl, Hans-Christian Jetter, and Michael Zöllner for their remarkable support. All described prototypes were implemented using our framework

Harald Reiterer is a professor in
the Department of Computer and
Information Science at the
University of Konstanz, Germany
and head of the Human-
Computer Interaction lab. He
established the lab in 1997 with
an initial focus on visual information seeking sys-
tems. In the last few years his research has shifted
toward more holistic interaction paradigms for the
post-WIMP world.