Designing conversation-context recommendation display to support opportunistic search in meetings

In meetings, people sometimes come across information in the environment or in the conversation. This kind of accidentally encountered information may be or not be relevant to the main meeting topic, but stirs people's temporary interest and mediates group conversation. In some cases people even need to search these unexpected terms in the Web. This phenomenon is called opportunistic search. We question if digital displays can be designed to support opportunistic search in meetings. Assuming information sharing in collocated meetings may largely come from conversation, we propose to design an ambient tabletop display that provides just-in-time conversational information to support opportunistic browsing and searching. In this paper, we present our design explorations with user study, and answer some of the major design questions for such systems.