Designing a proactive multi-touch display to support professional networking and planning at an interdisciplinary conference

Presented in this report is the design of Confluence, a system that enables conference attendees to explore the various events scheduled to take place over the course of a conference and which informs its users of those events that may be of particular interest to them. This system was designed specifically for the 2009 International Digital Media & Arts Association Conference, which is notable for the breadth of interests of its attendees. One of the key features of this system is a proactive display: a display which shows content based on proximity of individuals in addition to standard program logic. In order to promote collaboration and communication of conference attendees, Confluence, which has been designed to run on the Microsoft Surface, supports interaction through a large, multi-touch display.