Let's Work Together: Supporting Two-Party Collaborations with New Forms of Shared Interactive Representations

Collaboration generally refers to people working together as a team towards a common goal. Here we discuss a different kind of collaboration: salesbased transactions which occur between two parties who have different goals, which are nevertheless mutually interdependent. Findings from an ethnographic field study of the way travel agents and customers build up complex products (e.g. round-theworld trips) showed the collaboration to be asymmetrical, affecting the success of its outcome. We discuss how we developed a collaborative technology, aimed at reducing the cognitive load involved during planning. We designed an interactive trip planner, that dynamically links a number of information resources and visualisations, co-displayed on three adjacent screens embedded in a shared worktable. Preliminary findings showed that using these kinds of graphical constraining enabled the two parties to quickly build up a shared reference and mutual understanding, which in turn facilitated more effective collaboration.