Designers often use examples for inspiration; examples offer contextualized instances of how form and content integrate. Can interactive example galleries bring this practice to everyday users doing design work, and does working with examples help the designs they create? This paper explores whether people can realize significant value from explicit mechanisms for designing by example modification. We present the results of three studies, finding that independent raters prefer designs created with the aid of examples, that examples may benefit novices more than experienced designers, that users prefer adaptively selected examples to random ones, and that users make use of multiple examples when creating new designs. To enable these studies and demonstrate how software tools can facilitate designing with examples, we introduce interface techniques for browsing and borrowing from a corpus of examples, manifest in the Adaptive Ideas Web design tool. Adaptive Ideas leverages a faceted metadata interface for viewing and navigating example galleries.

Designers frequently use examples for inspiration. Information technologies have facilitated designers’ access to examples. This paper examines the hypothesis that designers can realize significant value from explicit mechanisms for creation by example modification. The work offers two contributions. First, we introduce techniques for dynamically creating interfaces for example-based design tools using decision-theoretic selection, designer specification, and end-user preference as inputs. We present a manifestation of these techniques in the Adaptive Ideas web editor, which leverages metadata to automatically generate displays of examples, semantically navigate these examples, and facilitate design by example modification. Second, we report on two experiments that explore if and how such presentation techniques impact the quality of resulting designs. These studies found that independent raters prefer designs created with the aid of examples, that the benefit examples provide is higher for novice designers than experts, and that designers prefer adaptively selected examples to random ones. ACM Classification: H.5.2. [Information Interfaces]: User Interfaces—Graphical user interfaces; Interaction styles. D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools and Techniques—user interfaces. General terms: Design, Human Factors, Algorithms

Today's designers generate content both on paper and online. Designers spread their work over physical and digital media, each of which has powerful—but distinct—sets of affordances. Recent work suggests that augmented paper interfaces can marry the ubiquity of paper interactions with the ease of search, annotation, and presentation afforded by digital representation. This dissertation examines novel ways to support and augment the practice of design through sharing and reappropriation of digitally captured design content.The thesis of this dissertation is that an ecology for design that integrates augmented physical and digital tools can facilitate collaboration between designers and improve the visibility of design practice through the sharing and proactive presentation of design content. Our contributions are twofold: we study actual use of augmented tools for capture and access of visual design content, and we describe an approach for proactive display of example design materials that uses design dimensions as facets in selection and presentation algorithms. To investigate the potential value of augmented tools for design, we developed the iDeas design ecology, which integrates physical notebooks with a digital faceted metadata browser that offers explicit annotation and sharing mechanisms, and conducted four studies with student design teams. Our findings indicate that, while there are clear benefits to tool use, such as increased excerpting and sharing of design material, users perceive high costs of maintenance and access control issues when using explicit capture and sharing tools. The findings from these studies motivated our second tool, Adaptive Ideas, which explores the use of implicit mechanisms to improve visibility of example design resources. We describe a facet-based approach to selecting, presenting, and browsing design material adaptively, using decision-theoretic selection and end-user preference as inputs. Results from a laboratory study of an example-based web page builder indicate that proactive presentation of examples is useful in helping designers explore and understand spaces of design alternatives.

An important challenge in designing ubiquitous computing experiences is negotiating transitions between explicit and implicit interaction, such as how and when to provide users with notifications. While the paradigm of implicit interaction has important benefits, it is also susceptible to difficulties with hidden modes, unexpected action, and misunderstood intent. To address these issues, this work presents a framework for implicit interaction and applies it to the design of an interactive whiteboard application called Range. Range is a public interactive whiteboard designed to support co-located, ad-hoc meetings. It employs proximity sensing capability to proactively transition between display and authoring modes, to clear space for writing, and to cluster ink strokes. We show how the implicit interaction techniques of user reflection (how systems indicate to users what they perceive or infer), system demonstration (how systems indicate what they are doing), and override (how users can interrupt or stop a proactive system action) can prevent, mitigate, and correct errors in the whiteboard's proactive behaviors. These techniques can be generalized to improve the designs of a wide array of ubiquitous computing experiences.

In a collaborative task, group dynamics have been shown to affect students' grades, motivation to pursue a topic or subject, documentation of the experience, learning, enjoyment of a project, and relationships with their classmates. The results presented in this paper illustrate the effect team dynamics also have upon technology appropriation, by combining proven data-collection strategies and the use of a system that augments paper sketchbooks with multimedia capture and sharing capabilities. We analyze the relationships between students' design notebooks, questionnaires, and interview responses, class observations, and course performance. Our study found that students' use of collaborative tools increases when they believe their teammates to be equally engaged and involved in the project. Moreover, students engaged in successful collaborations are likely to take fewer notes than those involved in conflict-filled collaborations, and students with considerable experience working in groups may bypass critical steps in creating joint problem-solving spaces with each new group.

Analogy plays an important cognitive role in reasoning and problem solving. One illustration of analogical cognition can be found in design practice, where viewing examples is an established technique for inspiration and learning. While digital information technologies have made it easier for designers to access examples of other designers’ work, significant opportunities exist for selecting and presenting examples in a proactive fashion. In this paper, we introduce techniques for dynamically deriving interfaces for examplebased design tools using decision-theoretic selection, designer specification, and end-user preference as inputs. This paper describes a manifestation of these techniques in the Adaptive Ideas web page builder, an HTML-based display platform for web page designers that leverages content metadata to automatically generate displays of examples. We present an evaluation of these techniques through a first-use study. ACM Classification: H.5.2. [Information Interfaces]: User Interfaces — Graphical user interfaces (GUI); Interaction styles. D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools and Techniques — user interfaces. H1.2. [Models and Principles]: User/ Machine Systems. General terms: Design, Human Factors, Algorithms

Range is an interactive whiteboard designed to support collocated, ad-hoc meetings. It employs proximity sensing to proactively transition between ambient and authoring modes, clear space for writing, and cluster ink strokes. The inspiration for Range stems from longitudinal studies of student design teams, in which we observed that shifts in collaborative activity correlated with changes in the users physical proximity to the whiteboard. Through iterative design, we developed techniques for incorporating implicit input like that of the proximity sensors into interaction.

Designers today use a variety of artifacts — both physical and digital — in the course of documenting their work. A resulting tension is that physical and digital media have significantly different affordances and organizing metaphors. Augmented paper interactions promise to mitigate some of this tension, yet there have been few real-world evaluations of these systems. To investigate their potential value for design, we studied two longitudinal deployments of augmented paper interactions with student design teams. Across two ten-week-long studies, 56 design students used the system, authoring over 4,000 pages of content in the course of their class work; this paper reports on their design habits and adoption patterns. We discuss the salient benefits (integrated digital repository for sketches and photographs), shortcomings that led to research insights (support for sharing physical and digital content), and barriers that persisted across both studies (perceived and actual costs of adoption discourage use). Author

Through a study of field biology practices, we observed that biology fieldwork generates a wealth of heterogeneous information, requiring substantial labor to coordinate and distill. To manage this data, biologists leverage a diverse set of tools, organizing their effort in paper notebooks. These observations motivated ButterflyNet, a mobile capture and access system that integrates paper notes with digital photographs captured during field research. Through ButterflyNet, the activity of leafing through a notebook expands to browsing all associated digital photos. ButterflyNet also facilitates the transfer of captured content to spreadsheets, enabling biologists to share their work. A first-use study with 14 biologists found this system to offer rich data capture and transformation, in a manner felicitous with current practice.

Design students use a variety of physical and digital content in the course of their studies. Augmented paper interactions promise to address this tension, yet there have been few real-world evaluations of these systems. In this paper, we present results from the first longitudinal study of augmented paper interactions for student design teams. We describe our experiences with developing and deploying the iDeas learning ecology, a system that integrates digital pens and cameras into design practice. Across two quarter-long studies, fifty-eight design students used iDeas, authoring over 4,000 pages of content in the course of their classwork. We report on their design habits, the when, what and how of their notebook usage, and pinpoint further avenues of study, including device ensembles. Through observation and analysis, we discovered that integrated paper and digital interactions enable new practices, including the ability to instrument and study design activity itself. We then observe limitations of current form factor and maintenance that inhibit longitudinal use. We conclude by identifying guidelines for development and potential directions for future research into hybrid technology systems for creative work. Figure 1. Design teams in action. Students in the introductory HCI design class work with a variety of media during a group assignment. (Study 1)

Visibility of work practice is important because it enables peripheral participation of and facilitates coordination between colleagues. Moving activities from the physical world onto the digital desktop has diminished visibility by consigning the artifacts of work practice to the computer screen; the serendipity of stumbling across physical artifacts is lost. One method of reintroducing visibility is the proactive display of colleagues’ digital work artifacts. This paper introduces an adaptive content presentation technique designed to improve the visibility of content for both ambient awareness and interactive browsing. In this work, we define the information presentation problem to be dynamically focusing user attention to a maximally useful subset of available information. Our technique takes a decision-theoretic approach to interface generation, using content metadata as inputs to our algorithm. The data view is generated dynamically, based on high-level attributes of the current state and a declarative relationship between the user’s input and the resulting view. We have evaluated the technical efficacy of this algorithm by implementing it in the context of the ButterflyNet browser. Author

This dissertation explores the integration of physical and digital interactions for artifacts used in design sketching and brainstorming. The proposed system supports design practice using an ecology approach; an ecology is a collection of tools and content used by a group such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Expected contributions include novel models of sharing and collaboration; new designs for extending visibility via shared digital artifacts; lightweight methods for supporting design documentation; and evaluation of the effects of these approaches on design practice. We will evaluate these contributions by designing and implementing tools for browsing, sharing, and manipulating design content; testing components of these interfaces in laboratory studies; and assessing cumulative social and learning effects through longitudinal deployments.

We present results of the first longitudinal study of physical and digital technology hybrids for design education. Through deployment in an introductory HCI class, we have instrumented and analyzed traditional design practices with newer technological components. In particular, we show that hybrid Idea Logs that maintain the flexibility of paper notebooks can successfully implement the fluidity needed between teammates in design projects, and between the digital and physical world. Our preliminary analysis of questionnaires, performance data, and student design notebooks support our hypothesis that this hybrid of technologies may effectively address the needs of this domain, and suggest that basic digital affordances such as export and sharing of design content can improve the educational experience.

On wall-size displays with pen or touch input, users can have difficulties reaching display contents located too high, too low, or too far away. Drag-and-drop interactions can be further complicated by bezels separating individual display units. Researchers have proposed a variety of interaction techniques to address this issue, such as extending the user's reach (e.g., push-and-throw) and bringing potential targets to the user (drag-and-pop). In this paper, we introduce a new technique called push-and-pop that combines the strengths of push-and-throw and drag-and-pop. We present two user studies comparing six different techniques designed for extending drag-and-drop to wall-size displays. In both studies, participants were able to file icons on a wall-size display fastest when using the push-and-pop interface.

Physical design environments are places that support people engaged in the spatial, physical, tangible act of creation. It is now possible to augment workspaces with an amazing array of technologies to assist users in their creative endeavors. However, the integration of computing technologies into physical environments involves a new set of tools, technologies, principles and practices. In this panel, researchers working on the challenges of physical design support present their work through a walkthrough of their prototype work environments. Each environment will then be "remodeled" by a fellow researcher using his or her own approach, tools, and design philosophy. The goal of this session will be to explore the large variety of potential applications, tools, technologies, interfaces, and processes used by those working to augment the creative physical world.

This paper outlines experiences with latency and responsiveness in a distributed application. We analyze latency from the perspectives of the user and the system. From these experiences and analyses, we suggest questions and highlight tradeoffs that pertain to both HCI and systems in the realm of ubiquitous computing.