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)

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)