Engineering design typically occurs as a collaborative process situated in specific context such as computer-supported environments, however there is limited research examining the dynamics of design collaboration in specific contexts. In this study, drawing from situative learning theory, we developed two analytic lenses to broaden theoretical insights into collaborative design practices in computer-supported environments: (a) the role of spatial and material context, and (b) the role of social interactions. We randomly assigned participants to four conditions varying the material context (paper vs. tablet sketching tools) and spatial environment (private room vs commons area) as they worked collaboratively to generate ideas for a toy design task. We used wearable sociometric badges to automatically and unobtrusively collect social interaction data. Using partial least squares regression, we generated two predictive models for collaboration quality and creative fluency. We found that context matters materially to perceptions of collaboration, where those using collaboration-support tools perceived higher quality collaboration. But context matters spatially to creativity, and those situated in private spaces are more fluent in generating ideas than those in commons areas. We also found that interaction dynamics differ: synchronous interaction is important to quality collaboration, but reciprocal interaction is important to creative fluency. These findings provide important insights into the processual factors in collaborative design in computer-supported environments, and the predictive role of context and conversation dynamics. We discuss the theoretical contributions to computer-supported collaborative design, the methodological contributions of wearable sensor tools, and the practical contributions to structuring computer-supported environments for engineering design practice.

We present Sketcholution, a method for automatically creating visual histories of hand-drawn sketches. Such visual histories are useful for a designer to reflect on a sketch, communicate ideas to others, and fork from or revert to an earlier point in the creative process. Our approach uses a bottom-up agglomerative clustering mechanism that groups adjacent frames based on their perceptual similarity while maintaining the causality of how a sketch was constructed. The resulting aggregation dendrogram can be cut at any level depending on available display space, and can be used to create a visual history consisting of either a comic strip of highlights, or a single annotated summary frame. We conducted a user study comparing the speed and accuracy of participants recovering causality in a sketch history using comic strips, summary frames, and simple animations. Although animations with interaction may seem better than static graphics, our results show that both comic strip and summary frame significantly outperform animation.

Building a distributed user interface (DUI) application should ideally not require any additional effort beyond that necessary to build a non-distributed interface. In practice, however, DUI development is fraught with several technical challenges such as synchronization, resource management, and data transfer. In this paper, we present three case studies on building distributed user interface applications: a distributed media player for multiple displays and controls, a collaborative search system integrating a tabletop and mobile devices, and a multiplayer Tetris game for multi-surface use. While there exist several possible network architectures for such applications, our particular approach focuses on peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures. This focus leads to a number of challenges and opportunities. Drawing from these studies, we derive general challenges for P2P DUI development in terms of design, architecture, and implementation. We conclude with some general guidelines for practical DUI application development using peer-to-peer architectures.