Designing Tabletop Interfaces for Asymmetric Distributed Collaboration

Complex task domains such as emergency response and command and control often involve collaboration between operational personnel in the field and tactical personnel in a central command centre responsible for coordinating the efforts of those operational personnel. The asymmetry in their respective work environments, job responsibilities, available information, and situation constraints produce distinctly different technological requirements for potential support systems for these different personnel. This research focuses on the use of a tabletop display to support the planning and coordination duties of the tactical personnel. A primary goal is to address the inherent challenges of designing large-screen tabletop interfaces that support synchronous interaction, data sharing, and coordination with remote collaborators who have significantly diminished technological capabilities, particularly in terms of available display size. 1. Asymmetric Distributed Collaboration Various domains, including emergency response and command and control, involve coordinating a distributed team of people from a command centre. Operational personnel are those people situated in the field, responsible for performing the physical work such as gathering information or material items, or providing services. Tactical personnel are those people in a command centre coordinating the actions of multiple operational personnel. The difference between these roles leads to several forms of asymmetry. Operational personnel execute physical tasks (often while traversing the field setting), have detailed knowledge of the immediate situation around them, and receive information about new tasks from the tactical level. In contrast, tactical personnel perform the higherlevel functions of planning for future tasks, and coordinating the various operational personnel to ensure that the team satisfies the overall mission goals. They must remain aware of the state of all relevant personnel and resources, and consider information from many sources. These different task activities and environmental constraints lead to different technological requirements for any support systems developed for these tasks. Operational personnel, who tend to be mobile and can experience physically demanding situations, would need an extremely portable and robust device, such as a small handheld computer. In contrast, tactical personnel have few such environmental constraints, and thus can exploit stationary, large display systems. Large displays, such tabletop displays, provide benefits for productivity [1] and spatial awareness [4]. Additionally, a tabletop system could display the maps, schedules, documents, and other information necessary to support the tactical role. Advances in networking will enable data sharing between the devices used by the operational and tactical personnel, in addition to standard voice communication (Figure 1). Figure 1. Asymmetric distributed collaboration. We are designing interfaces for linked tabletop and handheld devices, to support real-time collaboration in a shared visual space. We will study how people collaborate in a test scenario to characterize the techniques they use and to inform design recommendations. In particular, we are interested in how the collaborators deal with the asymmetry in hardware and roles, which communication strategies they use to deal with the mismatch of information visibility, and how activity awareness between collaborators should be supported. tactical tabletop display operational handheld displays command centre field Poster abstract for the Tabletop 2007 workshop, Newport, Rhode Island, USA, October 2007