Fighting for control: children's embodied interactions when using physical and digital representations

  • Authors:
  • Paul Marshall;Rowanne Fleck;Amanda Harris;Jochen Rick;Eva Hornecker;Yvonne Rogers;Nicola Yuill;Nick Sheep Dalton

  • Affiliations:
  • Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom;University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom;University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom;The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom;University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom;The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom;University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom;The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.