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ments of representations also support changing work styles. Representations can
be fluidly dragged into personal work areas for individual or parallel work and
into a group space for closer collaboration.
3.4 Designing Information Visualizations for Co-located
Collaboration
Many known information visualization guidelines still apply to the design of in-
formation visualizations for co-located collaborative use (e. g., [10,92,99]). In this
section, we discuss changes and additions to aspects that need to be considered
when designing information visualizations for co-located collaborative settings.
Thus, much of this discussion simply delineates research questions that may of
specific interest when designing information visualizations to support co-located
collaboration.
Representation Issues:
Spence [87] defines representation as “the manner in
which data is encoded,” simplifying Marr's [62] definition of representation as a
formal system or mapping by which data can be specified. The concept of rep-
resentation is core to information visualization since changes in representations
cause changes in which types of tasks are most readily supported. As in Marr's
[62] example, the concept of thirty-four can be represented in many ways. To
look at three of them; Arabic numerals, 34, ease tasks related to powers of ten;
Roman numerals, XXXIV, simplify addition and subtraction; and a binary rep-
resentation, 100010, simplifies tasks related to powers of two. Not surprisingly,
Zhang and Norman [110] found that providing different representations of the
same information to individuals provides different task eciencies, task com-
plexities, and changes decision-making strategies. Questions arise as to what are
the most effective representations during collaboration. Will certain representa-
tions be better suited to support small group discussions and decision making?
Will multiple representations be more important to support different people's
interpretation processes? Will new encodings or representations be needed for
collaborative work scenarios? Appropriate representations might have to be cho-
sen and adapted depending on the display type chosen but whether completely
new designs are required is not yet clear.
For example, different representations may have to be accessible in an inter-
face because in a collaborative situation, group members might have different
preferences or conventions that favour different types of representations. Gutwin
and Greenberg [39] have discussed how different representations of the workspace
affect group work in a distributed setting. They point out that providing mul-
tiple representations can aid the individual but can restrict how the group can
communicate about the objects in the workspace. This extends to co-located set-
tings, in which several representations of a dataset can be personalized according
to taste or convention, making it harder to relate individual data items in one
representation to a specific data item in another. For example, relating one spe-
cific node in a treemap [50] to another node in a node-link diagram might require
a search to locate the respective node in the other representation. Implementing
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