Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専

Tools and Methods to Analyze Multimodal Data in Collaborative Design Ideation

Collaborative design ideation is typically characterized by informal acts of sketching, annotation, and discussion. Designers have always used the pencil-and-paper medium for this activity, partly because of the flexibility of the medium, and partly because the ambiguous and ill-defined nature of conceptual design cannot easily be supported by computers. However, recent computational tools for conceptual design have leveraged the availability of hand-held computing devices for creating and sharing ideas. In order to provide computer support for collaborative ideation in a way that augments traditional media rather than imitates it, it is necessary to study the affordances made available by digital media for this process, and to study designers\u27 cognitive and collaborative processes when using such media. In this thesis, we present tools and methods to help make sense of unstructured verbal and sketch data generated during collaborative design, with a view to better understand these collaborative and cognitive processes. This thesis has three main contributions

Phrasing Bimanual Interaction for Visual Design

Architects and other visual thinkers create external representations of their ideas to support early-stage design. They compose visual imagery with sketching to form abstract diagrams as representations. When working with digital media, they apply various visual operations to transform representations, often engaging in complex sequences. This research investigates how to build interactive capabilities to support designers in putting together, that is phrasing, sequences of operations using both hands. In particular, we examine how phrasing interactions with pen and multi-touch input can support modal switching among different visual operations that in many commercial design tools require using menus and tool palettes—techniques originally designed for the mouse, not pen and touch. We develop an interactive bimanual pen+touch diagramming environment and study its use in landscape architecture design studio education. We observe interesting forms of interaction that emerge, and how our bimanual interaction techniques support visual design processes. Based on the needs of architects, we develop LayerFish, a new bimanual technique for layering overlapping content. We conduct a controlled experiment to evaluate its efficacy. We explore the use of wearables to identify which user, and distinguish what hand, is touching to support phrasing together direct-touch interactions on large displays. From design and development of the environment and both field and controlled studies, we derive a set methods, based upon human bimanual specialization theory, for phrasing modal operations through bimanual interactions without menus or tool palettes

NodeTrix: Hybrid Representation for Analyzing Social Networks

The need to visualize large social networks is growing as hardware capabilities make analyzing large networks feasible and many new data sets become available. Unfortunately, the visualizations in existing systems do not satisfactorily answer the basic dilemma of being readable both for the global structure of the network and also for detailed analysis of local communities. To address this problem, we present NodeTrix, a hybrid representation for networks that combines the advantages of two traditional representations: node-link diagrams are used to show the global structure of a network, while arbitrary portions of the network can be shown as adjacency matrices to better support the analysis of communities. A key contribution is a set of interaction techniques. These allow analysts to create a NodeTrix visualization by dragging selections from either a node-link or a matrix, flexibly manipulate the NodeTrix representation to explore the dataset, and create meaningful summary visualizations of their findings. Finally, we present a case study applying NodeTrix to the analysis of the InfoVis 2004 coauthorship dataset to illustrate the capabilities of NodeTrix as both an exploration tool and an effective means of communicating results

IxSketch: A Design Tool for Sketching Interactive Prototypes

As part of this thesis, IxSketch will be developed, a proof of concept tool for prototyping interfaces that aims to bring the strengths of paper prototyping into the digital realm. We aim to do so by providing ways of sketching interactions as well as the traditional interface layout and components

Developing Digital Media Platforms for Early Design

In recent times, mobile devices are becoming an integral part of our daily life. Software applications on these handheld devices are successfully migrating the traditional paper-based activities such as reading news, books, and even navigating through maps, onto the digital medium. While these applications allow information access anywhere and anytime, there is still a necessity for repurposing these digital media to support content/information creation especially in domains such as industrial design where paper-based activities are common. To utilize direct-touch tablets for collaborative conceptual design, we studied their affordances and iteratively developed a web-based wiki system, named skWiki. In this thesis, we first report an evaluation of the impact of utilizing a capacitive stylus for tracing and sketching on direct-touch tablets. This study uncovers the differences in quantitative and qualitative performance of the tablet medium compared to the paper medium when using a stylus (pen) or finger input for both tracing and sketching. While paper performed better overall, we found that the tablet medium, when used with a capacitive stylus, performed comparably to the paper medium for sketching tasks. These findings can guide sketch application designers in developing an appropriate interaction design for various input methods. In order to explore the advantages of the ubiquity of information generated on digital media, we developed Sketchbox, an Android application for sketching and sharing ideas using Dropbox as the storage cloud. An evaluation of the usage patterns of this application in a collaborative toy design scenario provided necessary guidelines for developing the skWiki system. skWiki overcomes the drawbacks of traditional wiki software, that are used as design repositories, by providing a rich editor infrastructure for sketching, text editing, and image editing. Apart from these features, skWiki provides a higher degree of freedom in sharing (cloning, branching, and merging) different versions of a sketch at various data granularities by introducing the concept of paths for maintaining revisions in a collaborative design process. We evaluated the utility of skWiki through a user study by comparing constrained and unconstrained sharing models. Furthermore, skWiki was used by the students of toy design and product design courses for both collaborative ideation and design activities. We discuss the findings and qualitative feedback from the evaluation of skWiki, and potential features for the next version of this tool