Iterative Design of a Paper + Digital Toolkit: Supporting Designing, Developing, and Debugging

Abstract

With advances in digital pens, there has been recent interest in supporting augmented paper in both research and commercial applications. This paper introduces the iterative design of a toolkit for event-driven programming of augmented paper applications. We evaluated the toolkit with 69 students (17 teams) in an external university class, gathering feedback through e-mail, in-person discussions, and analysis of 51,000 lines of source code produced by the teams. This paper describes successes and challenges we discovered in providing an event-driven architecture as the programming model for paper interaction. Informed by this evaluation, we extended the toolkit with visual tools for designing, developing, and debugging, thereby lowering the threshold for exploring paper UI designs, providing informal techniques for specifying UI layouts, and introducing visualizations for event handlers and programming interfaces. These results have implications beyond paper applications — R3 takes steps toward supporting programming by example modification, exploring APIs, and improved visualization of event flow