ABSTRACT
Department of Product Design, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Referring, the act of drawing another person’s attention towards some entity through words or actions, is an essential part of collaboration. In this paper we propose a new design principle: referability. This principle should aid designers in making the contents of collaborative tools easy to refer to. The principle is backed up by a framework that outlines key elements of the practice of referring: what vocabularies people use when they refer, what elements they refer to, and how they do the actual referring. The framework should give designers a better understanding of how it is possible improve the referability of a tool and what pitfalls to avoid.
