Time: 4pm, Tuesday November 28
Place: Room 110, South Hall


Shared Drawing: From Observational Studies to Working Prototypes

                    John C. Tang, Sun Labs

Informal, free-hand drawing is a natural part of group meetings, 
especially among designers.  Yet, as more and more meetings become 
distributed across different locations, we need to develop tools to 
support that shared drawing process over distance.  In this talk, I will 
describe some observational studies of design teams focusing on how they 
use their shared drawing space.  I will then describe how those studies 
of use led to the design of several video-based shared drawing 
prototypes.  VideoDraw provides a shared tablet-sized drawing space,  
VideoWhiteboard provides a shared whiteboard-sized drawing space, and 
VideoCom merges the expressiveness of the video image with the 
flexibility of computerized drawing tools.  These prototypes were studied 
in use to continue the iterative cycle of observing work activity and 
designing new technology to support it.