TwisterSearch: Supporting Social Search with Tabletop and Mobile Displays

Abstract

This demo presents TwisterSearch, a system for co-located and collaborative Web search that was designed in accordance with the canonical model of social search by Evans and Chi (2009). In a first phase before search, participants frame the context of the intended search and thereafter gather initial information requirements on a tabletop. These requirements are then refined through discussion and yield the foundation for the search task itself, which is performed in parallel on multiple mobile displays. These private devices are used to search the Web for evidence files and to populate the visual workspace of the tabletop with them. Moreover, the personal device allows both a highly parallel search as well as a tightly-coupled collaborative search, to enable seamless switching between collective and solitary search activities. In our TwisterSearch demo, participants can have a firsthand experience of these different individual phases of social search.