Ambiguous Intentions: a paper-like interface for creative design

Authors : Mark D Gross, Ellen Yi-Luen Do

Comments:
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Summary:
This paper discusses about sketch recognition application in Designing.

Interfaces for conceptual and creative design should recognize and interpret drawings. They should also capture users’ intended ambiguity, vagueness, and imprecision and convey these qualities visually and through interactive behavior.
Electronic Cocktail Napkin - freehand drawing environment implemented using Lisp using Wacom tablets, Apple Newton PDAs , mouse / trackball .

Configuration recognizer - recognizes set of shapes based on components and context. User defined recognizer is used. Recognizer is trained using the user drawn examples. The recognition features used depends on the context. For example, spatial relation may not be used for Circuit diagrams, instead connection are used to identify patterns. In case of ambiguity, the system retains the shape and alternatives till it resolves the ambiguity.

Imprecision - After recognizing the shapes, the system maintains connectivity, adjacency and alignment constraints. This allows user to stretch/ move the shapes. Domain specific context is used to identify the constraints to be applied while such edits.
User can gradually tighten the constraints to make a final design.

Implementation - Recognizer for strokes , Recognizer for Configuration and maintenance of constraints. As all the recognizers depend on the context information, the system maintains a current context which varies with the recognition results of the current stroke drawn.

Discussion:
This paper has taken good leverage of incremental design.
The idea of applying context to identify configuration is very interesting. This system identifies the current context based on the strokes drawn previously. there can be recognition problems when system ends up in conflicting context information.
The notion of measuring commitment and certainty of the designer from the precision, roughness, speed and overtracing is very interesting.