Complementarity of Input Devices to Achieve Knowledge Sharing in Meetings

In co-located meetings, participants create and share content to establish a common understanding. In this paper, we present a collaborative environment that enables group members to create and share content simultaneously by providing them with different kinds of individual input devices and a shared workspace. We also report on an exploratory study to investigate the influence of the input device used on the shared knowledge produced by the group. The results suggest that driven by the affordances, various input devices complement each other. We thus recommend groups to be equipped with multitude of them to support diverse meeting task demands. Additionally, we observed that groupware usage differs across various phases of the problem-solving activity. This provides implications for the design of collaborative environments to assist each of the respective phases of the task, in order to extend their usefulness for the group.