Idea Archipelago
Digital Whiteboard Application to SUpport Long-Term Collaborative Design PRojects
“How can design teams achieve and maintain a common, big-picture understanding of a project over the long-term?”
Project Overview
In a design team, it can be difficult to maintain a common big-picture overview and understanding of a project. Part of the problem is being able to make sense of the numerous assets that come into play in fuzzy and creative workflows. Idea Archipelago is a visual, grid-based project management tool that helps teams organize their data and allows users to collect, organize, and share all project-related information assets. Our design was guided by the goals to make information visible in order to support long-term collaboration in design projects.
Approach
Inspired by the ways in which designers often place print-outs of aspects of a project on a wall as a visual reference, we envisioned a digital playground that teams of designers could contribute to, in order to form a collective overview of a shared design project. We determined a set of guiding design principles, and coded an interactive whiteboard application in alignment with these. We then performed an informal user study to elicit some feedback on the concept.
Results
We created a prototype that introduced a novel grid-based visualization of data assets, designed for direct pen-based interaction on digital whiteboards. The visualization housed assets including documents, sketches, images, and more. A fundamental interaction concept was allowing users to 'snap' assets into place in different slots. In this way, it allowed users to form visual groups or 'islands' by placing items side-by-side. Users could freely navigate on this canvas. To keep interaction easy, the application supported two distinct zoom-levels: one to see assets close-up and in details, and another to see an overview in order to get an up-to-date picture of the overall project.
IdeaArchipelago Project Video.
PUblication
Y. Xu, F. Perteneder, J. Leong, E. Schwaiger, and M. Haller: Using Grid Visualization to Organize Visual Data. In Proc. Chinese CHI ’14, Toronto, Canada (2014), 50-56.
Themes
Long-term collaborative design projects, infomation visualization
Skills & Technologies
Interactive Whiteboards, Pen-based interaction, WPF/C#, UI/UX Design