Collaborative Design Work in Technology Education

Peer reviewe

Sociality, Physicality and Spatiality: touching private and public displays

This paper considers two strands of research that each contributes to an understanding of touch-based interaction with private and public displays. The first is based on general frameworks for private device–public display interaction, which is driven by the growing body of work in the area, but focuses on the level of integration of public and private devices and the importance of understanding social setting and bystanders. The second strand is centred on physicality; how different kinds of physical device impact interaction and how modelling of touch-based devices causes particular problems that require notations and formalisms of continuous and bodily interaction

Trigger Analysis - understanding broken tasks

Why do things happen when they happen? Trigger analysis exposes the triggers that prompt sub-tasks to occur in the right order at the right time, and assess whether tasks are robust to interruptions, delays and shared responsibility. Trigger analysis starts with task decomposition via any suitable method, proceeding to uncover what trigger prompts each sub-task. The obvious answer: "because the previous sub-task is complete " is often the precondition, not the actual trigger. Previous analysis has uncovered certain primary triggers and potential failure points. The complete analysis produces an ecologically richer picture, with tasks interacting with and prompted by their environment