GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-98-34
Title:
The Right Tool at the Right Time -- Investigation of Freehand Drawing as
an Interface to Knowledge Based Design Tools
Authors:
Ellen Vi-Luen Do
Abstract:
Designers use different symbols and configurations in their drawings to
explore alternatives and to communicate with each other. For example,
when thinking about spatial arrangements, they draw bubble diagrams;
when thinking about natural lighting, they draw a sun symbol and light
rays. Given the connection between drawings and thinking, one should be
able to infer design intentions from a drawing and ultimately use such
inferences to program a computer to understand our drawings. This
dissertation reports findings from empirical studies on drawings and
explores the possibility of using the computer to automatically infer
designer's concerns from the drawings a designer makes.
This dissertation consists of three parts: 1) a literature review of
design studies, cognitive studies of drawing and computational sketch
systems, and a set of pilot projects; 2) empirical studies of
diagramming design intentions and a design drawing experiment; and 3)
the implementation of a prototype system called
Right-Tool-Right-Time.
The main goal is to find out what is in design drawings that a computer
program should be able to recognize and support. Experiments were
conducted to study the relation between drawing conventions and the
design tasks with which they are associated. It was found from the
experiments that designers use certain symbols and configurations when
thinking about certain design concerns. When thinking about allocating
objects or spaces with a required dimension, designers wrote down
numbers beside the drawing to reason about size and to calculate
dimensions. When thinking about visual analysis, designers drew sight
lines from a view point on a floor plan.
Based on the recognition that it is possible to associate symbols and
spatial arrangements in a drawing with a designer's intention, or task
context, the second goal is to find out whether a computer can be
programmed to recognize these drawing conventions. Given an inferred
intention and context, a program should be able to activate appropriate
design tools automatically. For example, concerns about visual analysis
can activate a visual simulation program, and number calculations can
activate a calculator. The Right-Tool-Right-Time prototype program
demonstrates how a freehand sketching system that infers intentions
would support the automatic activation of different design tools based
on a designers' drawing acts.
Keywords:
Freehand drawing, human-computer interaction, knowledge-based design tools
You can access this technical report via:
PDF
Postscript
|
