Innovation is now recognized as critical to economic growth and international competitiveness. While prototyping, manufacturing and even engineering work are routinely outsourced to foreign markets, design remains a key output of the nation. It is therefore imperative to improve the innovative capacity of designers, particularly those in engineering, through new design concepts, methods and tools to support transformative and creative design thinking. The goal of this project is to develop and test a digital platform for early design called C3DaR (Collection, Creation and Collaboration for Engineering Design and Reflection). C3DaR will transform the creative process of early design for engineering by applying a computer-as-partner paradigm in which the system becomes as an active contributor to the partnership between designers, artifacts and media. The research, education and dissemination efforts conducted as part of this project will greatly facilitate a paradigm shift in design to improve our nation?s creative design capacity.
This work is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant #1422341.
2015 |
Zhenpeng Zhao, William Benjamin, Niklas Elmqvist, K. Ramani (2015): Sketcholution: Interaction Histories for Sketching. In: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 82 pp. 11–20, 2015. (Type: Article | Abstract | Links | BibTeX)@article{Zhao2015,
title = {Sketcholution: Interaction Histories for Sketching},
author = {Zhenpeng Zhao and William Benjamin and Niklas Elmqvist and K. Ramani},
url = {http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~elm/projects/sketcholution/sketcholution.pdf, Paper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYvkIdJQtEk, Youtube video},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-05-16},
journal = {International Journal of Human-Computer Studies},
volume = {82},
pages = {11--20},
abstract = {We present Sketcholution, a method for automatically creating visual histories of hand-drawn sketches. Such visual histories are useful for a designer to reflect on a sketch, communicate ideas to others, and fork from or revert to an earlier point in the creative process. Our approach uses a bottom-up agglomerative clustering mechanism that groups adjacent frames based on their perceptual similarity while maintaining the causality of how a sketch was constructed. The resulting aggregation dendrogram can be cut at any level depending on available display space, and can be used to create a visual history consisting of either a comic strip of highlights, or a single annotated summary frame. We conducted a user study comparing the speed and accuracy of participants recovering causality in a sketch history using comic strips, summary frames, and simple animations. Although animations with interaction may seem better than static graphics, our results show that both comic strip and summary frame significantly outperform animation.},
keywords = {}
}
We present Sketcholution, a method for automatically creating visual histories of hand-drawn sketches. Such visual histories are useful for a designer to reflect on a sketch, communicate ideas to others, and fork from or revert to an earlier point in the creative process. Our approach uses a bottom-up agglomerative clustering mechanism that groups adjacent frames based on their perceptual similarity while maintaining the causality of how a sketch was constructed. The resulting aggregation dendrogram can be cut at any level depending on available display space, and can be used to create a visual history consisting of either a comic strip of highlights, or a single annotated summary frame. We conducted a user study comparing the speed and accuracy of participants recovering causality in a sketch history using comic strips, summary frames, and simple animations. Although animations with interaction may seem better than static graphics, our results show that both comic strip and summary frame significantly outperform animation. |
2014 |
William Benjamin, Senthil Chandrasegaran, Devarajan Ramanujan, Niklas Elmqvist, SVN Vishwanathan, Karthik Ramani (2014): Juxtapoze: supporting serendipity and creative expression in clipart compositions. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 341–350, 2014. (Type: Inproceeding | Abstract | Links | BibTeX)@inproceedings{Benjamin2014,
title = {Juxtapoze: supporting serendipity and creative expression in clipart compositions},
author = {William Benjamin and Senthil Chandrasegaran and Devarajan Ramanujan and Niklas Elmqvist and SVN Vishwanathan and Karthik Ramani},
url = {http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~elm/projects/juxtapoze/juxtapoze.pdf, Paper
https://youtu.be/YkLFX16fSrA, Youtube video},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-01-01},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {341--350},
abstract = {Juxtapoze is a clipart composition workflow that supports creative expression and serendipitous discoveries in the shape domain. We achieve creative expression by supporting a workflow of searching, editing, and composing: the user queries the shape database using strokes, selects the desired search result, and finally modifies the selected image before composing it into the overall drawing. Serendipitous discovery of shapes is facilitated by allowing multiple exploration channels, such as doodles, shape filtering, and relaxed search. Results from a qualitative evaluation show that Juxtapoze makes the process of creating image compositions enjoyable and supports creative expression and serendipity.},
keywords = {}
}
Juxtapoze is a clipart composition workflow that supports creative expression and serendipitous discoveries in the shape domain. We achieve creative expression by supporting a workflow of searching, editing, and composing: the user queries the shape database using strokes, selects the desired search result, and finally modifies the selected image before composing it into the overall drawing. Serendipitous discovery of shapes is facilitated by allowing multiple exploration channels, such as doodles, shape filtering, and relaxed search. Results from a qualitative evaluation show that Juxtapoze makes the process of creating image compositions enjoyable and supports creative expression and serendipity. |