Sketches are much more than marks on paper; they play a key role for designers both in ideation and problem-solving as well as in communication with other designers. Thus, the act of sketching is often enriched with annotations, references, and physical actions, such as gestures or speech—all of which constitute meta-data about the designer’s reasoning. Conventional paper-based design notebooks cannot capture this rich metadata, but digital design notebooks can. To understand how and what data to capture, we conducted an observational study of design practitioners where they explore design solutions for a set of problems. We recorded and coded their sketching and non-sketching actions that reflect their exploration of the design space. We then categorized the captured meta-data and mapped observed physical actions to design intent. These findings inform the creation of future digital design notebooks that can better capture designers’ reasoning during sketching.

In this paper, we present a novel visualization framework for product and supply chain metadata in the context of redesign-related decision scenarios. Our framework is based on the idea of overlaying product-related metadata onto the interactive graph representations of a supply chain and its associated product architecture. By coupling environmental data with graph-based visualizations of product architecture, our framework provides a novel decision platform for expert designers. Here, the user can balance the advantages of a redesign opportunity and manage the associated risk on the product and supply chain. For demonstration, we present ViSER, an interactive visualization tool that provides an interface consisting of different mutually coordinated views providing multiple perspectives on a particular supply chain presentation. To explore the utility of ViSER, we conduct a domain expert exploration using a case study of peripheral computer equipment. Results indicate that ViSER enables new affordances within the decision making process for supply chain redesign.

Juxtapoze is a clipart composition workflow that supports creative expression and serendipitous discoveries in the shape domain. We achieve creative expression by supporting a workflow of searching, editing, and composing: the user queries the shape database using strokes, selects the desired search result, and finally modifies the selected image before composing it into the overall drawing. Serendipitous discovery of shapes is facilitated by allowing multiple exploration channels, such as doodles, shape filtering, and relaxed search. Results from a qualitative evaluation show that Juxtapoze makes the process of creating image compositions enjoyable and supports creative expression and serendipity.