Tools for Sketching

A collaboration between researchers at UC Berkeley and Microsoft Research, Pictionaire is a tabletop interactive collaboration system that “enables multiple designers to fluidly move imagery from the physical to the digital realm; work with found, drawn and captured imagery; organize items into functional collections; and record meeting histories.” It accomplishes this through us of a rear-projected display surface, gestural touch interactions with the novel addition of a digital camera mounted above the tabletop surface. With it, users can easily move images from printed media or even physical objects back and forth from the tabletop to a stored database of images.

(video, links and observations after the jump.)

Research that aims to explore methods of facilitating group collaborative processes form an entire subset of HCI research, but after watching Pictionaire’s project video, a few features jumped out at me right away. The basic image capture is much like an electronic whiteboard, where users can save and retrieve the contents of a reading surface. However, it’s interesting to see what opportunities open up when the collaboration surface is laid flat and is able to be combined with scanned images or objects.
Continue reading “Pictionaire – A Visual Worksurface

I just recently downloaded Tweetie, a desktop twitter client, and noticed that the company who makes it also makes a product called Scribbles. Noticing that its homepage proclaims Scribbles is ‘Incredibly easy to use’ and has a ‘Revolutionary User Interface’ I decided to give it a spin.

Scribbles is an ideal addition to any visual designer’s toolkit – it is simple without being simplistic, has features designed to enable creative flow and speed, and generally does a good job at what it claims to do. While I found its control over color a bit frustrating, the layer control and ‘trace’ tool were both features that I can actually see myself using. For a small piece of software like this that relies on demo versions to spur purchases, a handful of features that stick in a user’s mind can mean the difference between an application that is used once out of curiosity and one that is purchased and becomes a valued tool.
Continue reading “Scribbles Ignores the Conventional Wisdom

In 1963 Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad. In developing what was to be part of his phd thesis, Sutherland pioneered what would come to be known as the graphical user interface, parametric constraints and the very concept of object-oriented programming, which he developed in order to better manage memory on the limited capabilities of the machines he was working on.

Much has been written about Sketchpad, Sutherland and all of the developments in HCI, computer science and engineering that continue to flow from his work. In the context of this site however, it’s important to note that Sutherland’s innovative engineering solutions were all driven by the desire provide people the ability to express themselves more intuitively with technology. The application precedes the solution.

“A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.” –Ivan Sutherland.

Prezi is a Hungarian startup that has developed a tool to empower people to make stunning visual presentations using text and media. Using their intuitive (yet not fully cross-platform) editing tool, creating gorgeous, dynamic motion-based presentations is surprisingly easy.

As an exhibit designer, I personally found Prezi’s strong emphasis on scaling inspiring. Since exhibition designers use scale as one of their primary mechanisms of information organization, I can even see Prezi as a potential tool for prototyping exhibit content, where the ratio in size between header graphics, sub-headers, body text and captions can be as high as 100:1.

Like most sketching tools written about on this site, Prezi’s success relies as much on its limitations as it does in its features. While the possibilities for creating zooming presentations seems endless, Prezi keeps its users on track by providing only a few design templates, not allowing users to edit transition times between ’slides’ and otherwise keeping the system as simple as possible. A professional motion graphics designer might find this constraining, but a casual user (like me) can create very professional looking results in less than a half hour. See below for an example I created (oh yeah, the final product is easy to share, download and embed in a website.)

Click Read More for more analysis.

Continue reading “Twist your presentation like a Prezi!