Personal Space and Territorial Behavior – Sharing a Tabletop in Collaborative Enterprise Modeling

Abstract

Tabletops represent a convenient digital workspace that serves the purpose of collaborative enterprise modeling well. The participants of a modeling session must, however, share this workspace. In this paper, we will present a study on personal space and territorial behavior in collaborative modeling sessions of six different teams. We found that areas on the tabletop can be identified that are predominantly occupied by certain individuals. This, however, does not automatically imply the existence of personal territories. In fact, we state that personal territories were less represented than a general territory that seemed to belong to the whole team. The absence of an etiquette, e.g., participants usually did not ask for permission before taking away an item situated near a team colleague, underlines this finding and supports our assumption that the participants feel a collective ownership towards the model.