EAGER: skWiki - A Sketch-based Wiki

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

The fundamental research question posed by this project is how to provide an integrated, flexible, and scalable storage repository for early design sketches. Early design is characterized by informal, unstructured, and heavily collaborative work processes involving multiple participants, multiple forms of representational media, and a plethora of interactions between these. However, there currently exist no storage mechanisms capable of supporting the full scope of sketching for creative design. In practice, designers either resort to low-tech physical artifacts such as pen, paper, and whiteboards that lack the persistence of digital storage, or general purpose software such as e-mail or shared file systems where the storage mechanisms are not well-integrated with the creative process and also lack provenance, history, and versioning information. Intellectual Merit: The contribution of this project is to apply the concept of a Wiki to sketches. Wikis are collections of freely editable web documents and have become popular due to their capacity for drawing upon the crowd to create content. Wikis have also been shown to be particularly useful in early design, but existing Wiki software makes integrating visual representations burdensome. This research effort will be focused on designing, building, and evaluating a sketch-based Wiki (skWiki) that allows for combining vectorized sketches with text. Broader Impacts: Unlike prototyping, manufacturing, or even engineering, innovation cannot easily be outsourced and is now recognized as the single most important ingredient in our economy. Consequently, there has never been a clearer imperative to both create designs which will fundamentally change the competitive landscape, and also to improve the innovative capacity of designers, particularly those in engineering. To facilitate such synergistic effects, the skWiki framework designed in this project will be made available as Open Source. We will also use the tool for teaching engineering design.