A Networked Sketching Environment for Supporting Collective Creativity

Abstract

In the early conceptual design, individual designers often make extensive use of sketches to explore design problems. Moreover, within the collaborative design sessions, designers communicate and discuss with each other by sharing their temporary sketches. These private design artifacts are used to externalize ideas and share them with other designers in order to facilitate the performance of design sessions. During such social interaction performance, some abstraction behaviours behind social activities like collective creativity are synchronized. However, the existent tele-communication tools proposed for separated design groups, slightly hold back the activities of collective creativity. It makes designers dedicated just in the table discussion, and negatively influenced on collective creativity sharing. Thus, some private design artifacts became isolated in tele-communicative environments. In order to respect this, we propose an approach that uses the notion of Digital Backchannel to realize the sub-channel communications. In this paper, we also present the implementation of a working prototype of groupware application. Finally, we discussed some points from our studies