• Figure 3. We designed an organic interactive visualization called Blub (left) for supporting spatial reflection and sense-making tasks and the hyperbolic tree SketchVis (right) for capturing, visualizing, and interacting with design session histories.

information about the number of unique ideas, relations and links between ideas, annotations, and individual designers, as well as awareness of currently manipulated artifacts. In our user studies with creative practitioners, we found these kinds of visualizations are especially useful for creative facilitators during or after the sessions to analyze and improve the productivity of such activities.

March + April 2012

interactions

design artifacts over a longer period of time. Physical display space eventually needs to be cleared if the number of artifacts grows too large. Setting up new displays and clearing old ones impedes the reuse of design knowledge in later stages of a design process or across different design projects. Due to the dynamic nature of creative group work, organizing and archiving individual contributions in a formal structure is an awkward task. Technology gives us the ability to capture, store, and retrieve a virtually unlimited amount of design content in digital repositories or databases. It also allows us to capture and replay the history of design activities and compare and reflect over multiple steps and decisions of a complete design process. Just recently, dedicated tools emerged that are particularly designed for these activities, supporting situated reflection associated with digital or physical artifacts.

In our research we explore the
role of spatial visualizations in the
context of reflection activities. For
example, we adapted interactive
bubble visualizations [ 6] for Blub,
a zoomable interface for grouping
design artifacts on interactive sur-
faces such as multitouch tables or
walls (see Figure 3, left). Dynamic
bubbles thereby serve the purpose
of creating collections of digital
artifacts in organic groups. Our
goal with this visualization is to
augment reflection activities for
better identifying relations, ten-
sions, or analogies between the
grouped artifacts. In a different
context, we designed the visualiza-
tion SketchVis, which can be used
to capture and visualize histories of
collaborative design sessions. The
tree-like visualization is dynami-
cally generated by analyzing live
sketching activities performed
with digital pen and paper (see
Figure 3, right). Data retrieved from
the digital pens such as strokes,
pages, and pen identification are
used for displaying an interac-
tive hyperbolic tree, conveying

Designing Mixed-Media Work Environments The concepts we have discussed here represent small steps toward a larger vision of mixed-media design studios and the design of interactive spaces in general. We imagine that future work environments might integrate a multitude of the presented techniques with the ecology of tools and activities of real-life work practice in a complementary way—not only for design activities but for collaborative sense-making and thinking in general. Many