Bekker, M. M., Olson, J. S., and Olson, G. M. Analysis of gestures in face-to-face design teams provides guidance for how to use groupware in design. In DIS ’95: Proceedings of the 1st conference on Designing interactive systems (Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, 1995), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, pp. 157–166. [pdf]

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This paper presents some findings from ethnographic observations of collaborators using gestures in face-to-face meetings. This work summarize previous research on the field like the work of Tang that found that 35% of hand movements in a group meeting are gestures. They developed a coding scheme for gestures and they defined the following top-level categories: Kinetic (the movements reproduces an action performance), Spatial (the movement indicates distance or location or size), Point (fingers point to some person, to some object or place), and Other.

The authors found that pointing was an highly frequent gesture that was used in the majority of situation in their task. The paper also reports important critics to telepointers and to the ClearBoard system such as the fact that they are weak gesturing devices as they do not have the rich dynamics of human hands, arms, or body.