Supporting Transitions in Work: Informing Large Display Application Design by Understanding Whiteboard Use

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the practice of using a whiteboard for multiple tasks, and specifically how users employ whiteboards to smoothly transition between related sets of tasks. Our study underscores several basic, but important affordances of whiteboards that support this practice, including visual persistence, flexibility of interaction primitives, and their situated physicality. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of large display applications.