Notebooks that Share and Walls that Remember:
Electronic Capture of Design Education Artifacts
Brian Lee, Scott R. Klemmer
Stanford University HCI Group
Computer Science Department
Stanford, CA 94305-9035, USA
{balee, srk}@cs.stanford.edu
ABSTRACT
Design students and practitioners use physical notebooks
and walls for their expressive power, sketch-based interaction, and familiarity. Unfortunately, conservation of matter
limits the amount of sharing that can occur with physical
media, and electronic media offer affordances, such as
search, that could considerably augment project-based
learning. This poster presents the iDeas learning ecology
for electronic capture of design activity, which integrates
digital notebooks, blogs, walls, and other technologies to
allow designers to move ideas more seamlessly between
the world of bits and the world of atoms, marrying the
benefits of the physical with those of the electronic.
Keywords: Design education, mobile interaction, notebook
INTRODUCTION
Two long-standing traditions in art and design education
are the Idea Log, also known as a design notebook or research notebook, where students keep track of all their design ideas; and the studio critique, where students display
work-in-progress on the wall and present it to groups of
people in class. Today, these design activities primarily
involve physical artifacts. We believe that there is significant potential for further integrating technology into design
activities and education, from sharing ideas among classmates and teachers to improving education for future students by allowing them to study work from previous
courses. The iDeas system allows designers to take advantage of affordances in the digital world while preserving
advantages of the physical world.
IDEAS LEARNING ECOLOGY
The iDeas learning ecology comprises three elements: the
iDeas notebook, the iDeas blog, and the iDeas wall.
iDeas notebook
The iDeas notebook (see FIGURE 1) merges the worlds of
physical and electronic input, extending the traditional design notebook with electronic capture of sketches, digital
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Elements of the iDeas notebook. Left to right:
camera phone; digital pen; physical notebook page after
Idea Log activities; electronic file automatically created from
notebook page.
FIGURE 1:
photographs, and other media while retaining the physical
aspects of the Idea Log. Input technologies include digital
pens, which afford electronic captures of ink strokes, and
camera phones, which afford photo documentation and
voice recording. Both are commercially available and synchronize with PCs. These input devices provide three key
advantages for the iDeas system: they are expressive (rapidly capturing rich amounts of data), fluid (ready-at-hand,
familiar interaction, permitting designers to focus on tasks
rather than tools), and mobile (accompanying users in the
field and wherever, whenever design happens).
iDeas blog
Upon returning to their PCs, students can upload content to
the iDeas blog, which serves as a digital store of collected
and generated information. Two sources of inspiration are
traditional blogs, which are primarily text-based and require heavyweight interactions to add visual information,
and shared electronic portfolios [2], which explicitly support visual and textual information, but are still highly formalized. The iDeas blog extends both of these with lightweight, automatic integration and archival of iDeas notebook input, including sketches, digital photographs, and
audio recordings. The iDeas blog desktop interface (see
FIGURE 2) enables users to browse, search, and annotate the
heterogeneous content. The iDeas blog is also accessible
via the web, meaning that sharing is greatly simplified: any
authorized person with a web-aware device can view blog
contents.
iDeas wall
The third piece of the system, the iDeas wall (see FIGURE
3), provides an interactive surface for students to present
and collaboratively create both ideas and general purpose
content. It is a vertical display surface with direct
Photo montage conception of the iDeas wall.
Users conduct collaborative design activities with various
media in a dedicated space. Content may be imported from
the notebook and blog or created on the wall.
FIGURE 2: The iDeas blog desktop interface. Left: Flash
design sketch. Right: Java screenshot. Users browse and
annotate captured content, including sketches, digital
photos, voice records, text, and other media.
FIGURE 3:
manipulation capability (touch- and stylus-based input),
which affords collocated group interactions, including the
presentation interaction style of studio critiques and the
whiteboard interaction style of brainstorming sessions. The
iDeas wall provides three methods for users to create and
import content: they can sketch and write on the wall as
they would on a whiteboard; they can import content from
the iDeas blog; or they can bring up an iDeas notebook
page directly by using the pen as a command device. Content created on the wall is saved to the iDeas blog.
The iDeas learning ecology will be introduced to students
in design courses starting this fall. As we get feedback on
the system, we will continue to refine our designs and develop new techniques for integrating design activities and
interacting with a variety of design content and media.
RESEARCH HYPOTHESES
We hypothesize that imbuing physical notebooks and walls
with properties of electronic media will have three highlevel benefits: increased documentation, resulting from
fluid capture of design content; increased discussion, arising from simple sharing of media; and increased reflection,
emerging from search and archival of designs.
The iDeas system will be deployed to design students at
Stanford University and other educational institutions.
Based on user observations and data analysis from these
courses, we will evaluate and iterate on these hypotheses,
expanding our understanding of the issues involved in designing embodied technologies for design education.
More information, including project source code, may be
found at http://hci.stanford.edu/research/ideas.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Terry Winograd and Heidy Maldonado for their
insightful discussions.
REFERENCES
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RELATED WORK
The design of the iDeas notebook draws inspiration from
other notebook and digital ink systems, both physical (e.g.,
[3]) and electronic (e.g., [6]). The Audio Notebook [7] investigated the multimedia combination of paper notebooks
and audio interaction techniques. Classroom Presenter [1]
looked at the use of digital ink for annotation of structured
materials. LiveNotes [5] implemented a system for collaborative note-taking. The iDeas blog extends some of the
concepts behind blogs and electronic portfolios [2]. The
iDeas wall follows on prior research into augmented
whiteboards and design spaces (e.g., [4]).
4
5
6
7
CURRENT STATUS
iDeas is implemented in Java J2SE 5.0 using an HSQLDB
database. It shares infrastructure components with the ButterflyNet project [8]. Software is available as open source.
Hardware includes Nokia digital pens (using Anoto technology) and camera phones for the iDeas notebook, and
SMART interactive whiteboards for the iDeas wall. All are
commercially available products, allowing others to replicate the iDeas environment with minimal difficulty.
8
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