Tangible interactions in a digital age: Medium and graphic visualization in design journals

Abstract

Designers are interacting with an increasing number of digital tools in their design process; however, these are usually in addition to the traditional and ubiquitous paper-based design journals. This paper explores the medium of informal design information and its relationships with sketching behavior over three stages of the design process: preliminary investigation and user needs analyses, concept generation and development, and prototyping and testing. Our test bed consists of tangible, digital, and hybrid design journals collected from four semesters of UC Berkeley's graduate level, multidisciplinary course titled "Managing the New Product Development Process: Design Theory and Methods." We developed protocols for two categories of analysis: one that codes for the media type of each journal and its content, and another one that characterizes the content within the journal. We found a trend toward hybrid digital-tangible journals for the engineering students over the 4-year period. These hybrid journals exhibited a higher degree of detail over advancing design stages, which has been shown to correlate with improved project performance. We also present several case studies of unusual design journals that illustrate the range of designers' interpretations of design journals as a medium. Based on this descriptive research, features for interactive hybrid tangible-digital design journals are recommended.

The role of logbooks as mediators of engineering design work

“…supporting reflective practice (Valkenburg & Dorst, 1998). (Oehlberg et al, 2009;Sobek, 2002). Further, the overall results highlight the unique role of logbooks in bridging various media (with connections between various information sources), and supporting iterative work, where problem solving (67% of entries), exploring (64% of entries), and refinement are dominant (Currano & Leifer, 2009).…”

“…For example, Oehlberg et al (2009) notes that logbooks (or "design journals") are referred to in teaching material such as engineering textbooks. It is also a requirement at many universities that engineering students keep a logbook for certain parts of their course, to both encourage "good practice" and to allow the instructor to better assess the students' progress.…”

“…It is also a requirement at many universities that engineering students keep a logbook for certain parts of their course, to both encourage "good practice" and to allow the instructor to better assess the students' progress. Many organisations also mandate the use of logbooks to ensure a record of the development of ideas for intellectual property claims (Hyman, 2003), with Oehlberg et al (2009) With respect to the second factor, logbooks contain information that can be considered to provide evidence of design intent, alternatives, and rationale, such as sketches, calculations, and meeting notes (McAlpine et al, 2006;Sobek, 2002). The importance of this content is illustrated by Subrahmanian et al (1997) who show that "design history and rationale are continually being lost and that this loss can result in the need to recreate the rationale of a design.…”

“…low cost, ease of access, and non-linear interaction (Liang et al, 1998;Wilcox et al, 1997). In particular, projects have sought to produce digital alternatives that replicate the logbook's 'surface' functionality such as the tagging of information (Fredian & Stillerman, 2006) or the medium of the logbook itself (Oehlberg et al, 2009). A recurring criticism of these approaches in the engineering domain is that they do not account for the key cognitive support provided by logbooks in the form of mediation (Currano & Leifer, 2009;Hicks et al, 2002).…”

Investigating the Feasibility of Digitally Created Industrial Design Sketchbooks

“…Chin and Tan (2007) assessed the use of tablet PCs running SketchBook Pro software, as a learning and assessment tool for students and teachers, as well as a means to compile a digital design sketchbook to document design activity and, in particular, student-tutor graphical dialogues. Oehlberga et al (2009) made a crosscomparison of tangible, digital and hybrid engineering design sketchbooks (or 'journals' in their terminology) across a four-year period, regarding their differential uptake, presentation and content. Weibel et al (2011) proposed solutions for remote collaborative sketching on "interactive paper", involving a shared digital workspace where each participant sketches with a digital pen.…”