• 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