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Designing interactivity for the specific context of designerly collaborations

We report on one of several exploratory, formulative studies that we conducted to help inform the thoughtful use of mixed physical and digital interactivity in a wiki-based system targeted at design collaborations. This study had two parts, both involving bar-coded cards, a bar-code scanner, and a projector. One part emphasized a creative, synthesis-oriented design activity. The other part emphasized a decision-making design activity.We learned that our method of designing the physical cards and the variance in the types of information we included on the cards significantly affected the collaborative behaviors. We also learned that the extension of interactivity from the digital to the physical world and back again successfully scaffolded both creative and decision-making activities in our context, although with some very notable differences in interactive behaviors between the specific activities. This latter point notwithstanding, we learned that allowing high-resolution, small size physical cards to be arrayed and manipulated on a shared surface matters much more for the purposes of scaffolding the collaborative activities than the ability to scan and project large-size, low-resolution facsimiles of the same information, in specific contexts of collaborative story-creation and decision making.