Theory of Tabletop Territoriality

This chapter discusses empirical and theoretical investigations of the practice of tabletop territoriality in order to understand how to exploit such social interaction practices that people have developed over years of collaborating in traditional tabletop environments in the design of digital tabletops. These investigations reveal that collaborators at traditional tabletop workspaces use three types of tabletop territories to help coordinate their interactions within the shared tabletop workspace: personal, group, and storage territories. These tabletop territories facilitate collaborative interactions on a table by providing commonly understood social protocols that help people to share a tabletop workspace by clarifying which regions are available for individual or joint task work, to delegate task responsibilities, to coordinate access to task resources by providing lightweight mechanisms to reserve and share task resources, and to organize the task resources in the workspace.