This research addresses one of the most critical problems emerging in the interface design community - access by individual designers, and groups of designers, to computational tools that facilitate rather than inhibit the process of creative thinking in the early stages of design. The early stages of design are when interactive systems designers are first thinking about the concept, content and layout, and desired interactive behavior of a design solution. These stages are critical, as studies show that's when 70% of a final design solution is determined. As designers are increasingly pressured to produce effective solutions in less time, they are turning to the use of computer tools in these early design stages, but most computer tools were never developed to support creative thinking and could thus have the opposite effect. As the interface often accounts for over 50% of the overall development effort, software intensive projects cannot afford to correct creative lapses in the early stages later on in the design cycle. Design and creativity theory explain that the creative process can best be facilitated by support for a combination of sketching, alternative representations, working with multiple ideas in parallel, and collaboration. With this in mind, the PI will first develop a visual sketching language (VSL) that allows designers to sketch representations of content and behavior within an informal design tool, This tool will be embedded within a runtime system that allows the sketched designs to be executed, thereby producing functional prototypes through which designs can be better evaluated. To design the VSL, the PI will collect conduct field studies of designers building prototypes using low-fidelity tools and will analyze their problem solving strategies to elicit their conceptual models. The PI will also develop a groupware extension to the informal tool, that allows small design teams (consisting of 2-5 users) to work efficiently with multiple ideas in parallel and to collaborate effectively. The approach is to have each team member run the PI's informal tool on his or her personal device, all of which are networked to a single machine driving a large display that offers a shared visual workspace. An interactive iconic map will show thumbnail representations of designs on the local interface. Once connected, functionality will be available that allows each design to be separately configured as private (only accessible locally); public (viewable but not editable by others); and shared (viewable and editable by others). Group creativity will be facilitated by allowing individual designers to view different ideas (those created by other designers), and by allowing the group to re-interpret or modify each other's ideas, or to generate new ones. Finally, rigorous evaluations will be conducted as the project progresses, to quantify the utility of the PI's approach and of the tools developed. The results from these evaluations will provide the most extensive evidence to date of how computational tools affect individual and group creativity for interactive systems design.
Broader Impacts: The results of this work will advance the science of how to design computational tools that better facilitate creative thinking in the early stages of design. The developed software, empirical results, and lessons learned from this research should be applicable to many design and creative problem solving situations in which sketching, alternative representations, working with multiple ideas in parallel, and collaboration are paramount. This includes other interactive design domains as well as architectural, industrial, graphics, and mechanical design.
