I like this concept of “air boards”, an imaginary frame in front of the person that can be accessed with hand gestures. This space is often used by co-located speaker to symbolize diagrams and objects and the basic relationships between them: e.g., this is on top, this is under, this “talks to” this other thing, etc.

In gesture languages for the deaf, air boards can be used to instantiate a set of temporal pointer which are valid during the talk session: instead of spelling “Dan gibson” every time, after the first time I take this reference to the air board so that the next times I will have just to point at it.

In the literature the air boards have been studied by Olson & Olson:

In videotapes of software design meetings we saw someone describe a complex idea by drawing with his hands in the air (the “air board”; Olson & Olson, 1991). Later someone referred to “that idea” by pointing to the spot in the air where the first person had “drawn” his idea.

Probably worth looking at: Olson & Olson 1991: Olson, G. M., and Olson, J. S. (1991) User centered design of collaboration technology. Journal of Organizational Computing, 1, 61-83.

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Tags: human computer interaction, interaction design, universal cognitive distance