EAGER: skWiki - A Sketch-based Wiki

该项目提出的基本研究问题是如何为早期设计草图提供一个集成的、灵活的和可扩展的存储库。早期设计的特点是非正式、非结构化和高度协作的工作流程，涉及多个参与者、多种形式的表现媒体以及它们之间的大量交互。然而，目前还不存在能够支持创造性设计的全部草图的存储机制。在实践中，设计师要么求助于缺乏数字存储持久性的低技术物理制品，如笔、纸和白板，要么求助于通用软件，如电子邮件或共享文件系统，其存储机制与创作过程没有很好地集成，也缺乏来源、历史和版本信息。智力价值：这个项目的贡献是将Wiki的概念应用到草图上。维基是可自由编辑的网络文档的集合，由于其吸引人群创建内容的能力而变得流行起来。维基也被证明在早期设计中特别有用，但现有的维基软件使整合视觉表现变得繁琐。这项研究工作将集中在设计、构建和评估一个基于草图的Wiki(SkWiki)，它允许将矢量化的草图与文本相结合。更广泛的影响：与原型、制造甚至工程不同，创新不能轻易外包，现在被认为是我们经济中最重要的单一因素。因此，既要创造从根本上改变竞争格局的设计，又要提高设计师的创新能力，尤其是工程设计师的创新能力，这一点从未像现在这样明确。为了促进这种协同效应，本项目中设计的skWiki框架将以开放源码的形式提供。我们还将使用该工具进行工程设计教学。

The fundamental research question posed by this project is how to provide an integrated, flexible, and scalable storage repository for early design sketches. Early design is characterized by informal, unstructured, and heavily collaborative work processes involving multiple participants, multiple forms of representational media, and a plethora of interactions between these. However, there currently exist no storage mechanisms capable of supporting the full scope of sketching for creative design. In practice, designers either resort to low-tech physical artifacts such as pen, paper, and whiteboards that lack the persistence of digital storage, or general purpose software such as e-mail or shared file systems where the storage mechanisms are not well-integrated with the creative process and also lack provenance, history, and versioning information. Intellectual Merit: The contribution of this project is to apply the concept of a Wiki to sketches. Wikis are collections of freely editable web documents and have become popular due to their capacity for drawing upon the crowd to create content. Wikis have also been shown to be particularly useful in early design, but existing Wiki software makes integrating visual representations burdensome. This research effort will be focused on designing, building, and evaluating a sketch-based Wiki (skWiki) that allows for combining vectorized sketches with text. Broader Impacts: Unlike prototyping, manufacturing, or even engineering, innovation cannot easily be outsourced and is now recognized as the single most important ingredient in our economy. Consequently, there has never been a clearer imperative to both create designs which will fundamentally change the competitive landscape, and also to improve the innovative capacity of designers, particularly those in engineering. To facilitate such synergistic effects, the skWiki framework designed in this project will be made available as Open Source. We will also use the tool for teaching engineering design.