Collaborative Brainstorming Activity Results and Information Systems

The motivation of our research is the design and the implementation of tools supporting brainstorming activities of teams and mainly distant teams which have to collaborate. During parallel sessions, each team interacts with a large multi-touch device, produces and manipulates virtual post-it notes displayed and synchronized on both surfaces.

Starting from an experimental point of view, the paper presents different tools that we consider mandatory for supporting these activities: a resource channel for displaying and synchronizing the resources on each device, a TV channel for allowing the oral and visual communication between teams and an informationg system for storing and retrieving the resources related to activities. The paper also mentions the architectural design of the distributed application used for the resource channel. It involves several tactile devices with different sizes that display the resources. Finally, the paper describes an experiment where two teams situated in Japan and in France used these tools.