Wearable technologies draw on a range of disciplines, including fashion, textiles, HCI, and engineering. Due to differences in methodology, wearables researchers can experience gaps or breakdowns in values, goals, and vocabulary when collaborating. This situation makes wearables development challenging, even more so when technologies are in the early stages of development and their technological and cultural potential is not fully understood. We propose a common ground to enhance the accessibility of wearables-related resources. The objective is to raise awareness and create a convergent space for researchers and developers to both access and share information across domains. We present CHIMERA, an online search interface that allows users to explore wearable technologies beyond their discipline. CHIMERA is powered by a Wearables Taxonomy and a database of research, tutorials, aesthetic approaches, concepts, and patents. To validate CHIMERA, we used a design task with multidisciplinary designers, an open-ended usability study with experts, and a usability survey with students of a wearables design class. Our findings suggest that CHIMERA assists users with different mindsets and skillsets to engage with information, expand and share knowledge when developing wearables. It forges common ground across divergent disciplines, encourages creativity, and affords the formation of inclusive, multidisciplinary perspectives in wearables development.

Engineering design typically occurs as a collaborative process situated in specific context such as computer-supported environments, however there is limited research examining the dynamics of design collaboration in specific contexts. In this study, drawing from situative learning theory, we developed two analytic lenses to broaden theoretical insights into collaborative design practices in computer-supported environments: (a) the role of spatial and material context, and (b) the role of social interactions. We randomly assigned participants to four conditions varying the material context (paper vs. tablet sketching tools) and spatial environment (private room vs commons area) as they worked collaboratively to generate ideas for a toy design task. We used wearable sociometric badges to automatically and unobtrusively collect social interaction data. Using partial least squares regression, we generated two predictive models for collaboration quality and creative fluency. We found that context matters materially to perceptions of collaboration, where those using collaboration-support tools perceived higher quality collaboration. But context matters spatially to creativity, and those situated in private spaces are more fluent in generating ideas than those in commons areas. We also found that interaction dynamics differ: synchronous interaction is important to quality collaboration, but reciprocal interaction is important to creative fluency. These findings provide important insights into the processual factors in collaborative design in computer-supported environments, and the predictive role of context and conversation dynamics. We discuss the theoretical contributions to computer-supported collaborative design, the methodological contributions of wearable sensor tools, and the practical contributions to structuring computer-supported environments for engineering design practice.

Design thinking has an important role in STEM education. However, there has been limited research on how students engage in various modalities throughout the design process in hands-on design tasks. To promote middle school students’ engineering literacy, it is necessary to examine the use of design modalities during design. Using a case study approach, we examine middle school students’ design stages and modalities during design activities. We also identify the patterns of design processes in the teams with different design outcomes. Drawing on theories in design thinking and embodied interaction, we proposed a framework and devised a video analysis protocol to examine students’ design stages and modalities. Middle school students attending a design workshop engaged in two design activities in teams of 3–4 people. The design sessions were video recorded and analyzed using the video analysis protocol. The teams engaged in the stages of planning, building, and testing, while employing the verbal, the visual, and the physical modalities. The teams that varied in design outcomes exhibited different patterns in the use of multiple modalities during the design stages. This study contributes to research on design thinking by proposing a framework for analyzing middle school students’ multimodal design processes and presenting data visualization methods to identify patterns in design stages and modalities. The findings suggest the necessity to examine students’ use of design modalities in the context of design stages and imply the potential benefits of using multiple modalities during design. The implications for future research and education practices are also discussed.

We present an argument for using visual analytics to aid Grounded Theory methodologies in qualitative data analysis. Grounded theory methods involve the inductive analysis of data to generate novel insights and theoretical constructs. Making sense of unstructured text data is uniquely suited for visual analytics. Using natural language processing techniques such as parts-of-speech tagging, retrieving information content, and topic modeling, different parts of the data can be structured and semantically associated, and interactively explored, thereby providing conceptual depth to the guided discovery process. We review grounded theory methods and identify processes that can be enhanced through visual analytic techniques. Next, we develop an interface for qualitative text analysis, and evaluate our design with qualitative research practitioners who analyze texts with and without visual analytics support. The results of our study suggest how visual analytics can be incorporated into qualitative data analysis tools, and the analytic and interpretive benefits that can result.

The societal demand for inspiring and engaging science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students and preparing our workforce for the emerging creative economy has necessitated developing students’ self-efficacy and understanding of engineering design processes from as early as elementary school levels. Hands-on engineering design activities have shown the potential to promote middle school students’ self-efficacy and understanding of engineering design processes. However, traditional classrooms often lack hands-on engineering design experiences, leaving students unprepared to solve real-world design problems. In this study, we introduce the framework of a toy design workshop and investigate the influence of the workshop activities on students’ understanding of and self-efficacy beliefs in engineering design. Using a mixed method approach, we conducted quantitative analyses to show changes in students’ engineering design self-efficacy and qualitative analyses to identify students’ understanding of the engineering design processes. Findings show that among the 24 participants, there is a significant increase in students’ self-efficacy beliefs after attending the workshop. We also identified major themes such as design goals and prototyping in students’ understanding of engineering design processes. This research provides insights into the key elements of middle school students’ engineering design learning and the benefits of engaging middle school students in hands-on toy design workshops.

Despite its grounding in creativity techniques, merging multiple source sketches to create new ideas has received scant attention in design literature. In this paper, we identify the physical operations that in merging sketch components. We also introduce cognitive operations of reuse, repurpose, refactor, and reinterpret, and explore their relevance to creative design. To examine the relationship of cognitive operations, physical techniques, and creative sketch outcomes, we conducted a qualitative user study where student designers merged existing sketches to generate either an alternative design, or an unrelated new design. We compared two digital selection techniques: freeform selection, and a stroke-cluster-based "object select" technique. The resulting merge sketches were subjected to crowdsourced evaluation of these sketches, and manual coding for the use of cognitive operations. Our findings establish a firm connection between the proposed cognitive operations and the context and outcome of creative tasks. Key findings indicate that reinterpret cognitive operations correlate strongly with creativity in merged sketches, while reuse operations correlate negatively with creativity. Furthermore, freeform selection techniques are preferred significantly by designers. We discuss the empirical contributions of understanding the use of cognitive operations during design exploration, and the practical implications for designing interfaces in digital tools that facilitate creativity in merging sketches.

Design protocol analysis is a technique to understand designers’ cognitive processes by analyzing sequences of observations on their behavior. These observations typically use audio, video, and transcript data in order to gain insights into the designer's behavior and the design process. The recent availability of sophisticated sensing technology has made such data highly multimodal, requiring more flexible protocol analysis tools. To address this need, we present VizScribe, a visual analytics framework that employs multiple coordinated multiple views that enable the viewing of such data from different perspectives. VizScribe allows designers to create, customize, and extend interactive visualizations for design protocol data such as video, transcripts, sketches, sensor data, and user logs. User studies where design researchers used VizScribe for protocol analysis indicated that the linked views and interactive navigation offered by VizScribe afforded the researchers multiple, useful ways to approach and interpret such multimodal data.

The rapid rise in technologies for data collection has created an unmatched opportunity to advance the use of data-rich tools for lifecycle decision-making. However, the usefulness of these technologies is limited by the ability to translate lifecycle data into actionable insights for human decision-makers. This is especially true in the case of sustainable lifecycle design (SLD), as the assessment of environmental impacts, and the feasibility of making corresponding design changes, often relies on human expertise and intuition. Supporting human sensemaking in SLD requires the use of both data-driven and userdriven methods while exploring lifecycle data. A promising approach for combining the two is through the use of visual analytics (VA) tools. Such tools can leverage the ability of computer-based tools to gather, process, and summarize data along with the ability of human experts to guide analyses through domain knowledge or data-driven insight. In this paper, we review previous research that has created VA tools in SLD. We also highlight existing challenges and future opportunities for such tools in different lifecycle stages design, manufacturing, distribution and supply chain, use-phase, end-of-life (EoL), as well as life cycle assessment (LCA). Our review shows that while the number of VA tools in SLD is relatively small, researchers are increasingly focusing on the subject matter. Our review also suggests that VA tools can address existing challenges in SLD and that significant future opportunities exist.

We use sociometric trace data to create an index of dynamic group flow in collaborative design teams. Sixteen students in four teams worked on a collaborative engineering design task, while wearing sociometric devices to collect real-time data on team interaction. Results indicate that group flow as measured by dynamic trace data is partially correlated with self-reported flow. This finding implies the potential to use trace data to provide reliable and dynamic measures of task engagement during collaborative learning.

We present skWiki, a web application framework for collaborative creativity in digital multimedia projects, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs. skWiki overcomes common drawbacks of existing wiki software by providing a rich viewer/editor architecture for all media types that is integrated into the web browser itself, thus avoiding dependence on client-side editors. Instead of files, skWiki uses the concept of paths as trajectories of persistent state over time. This model has intrinsic support for collaborative editing, including cloning, branching, and merging paths edited by multiple contributors. We demonstrate skWiki's utility using a qualitative, sketching-based user study.

Sketching for conceptual design has traditionally been performed on paper. Recent computational tools for conceptual design have leveraged the availability of hand-held computing devices and web-based collaborative platforms. Further, digital sketching interfaces have the added advantages of storage, duplication, and sharing on the web. We have developed skWiki, a tool that enables collaborative sketching on digital tablets using a web-based framework. We evaluate skWiki in two contexts, (a) as a collaborative ideation tool, and (b) as a design research tool. For this evaluation, we perform a longitudinal study of an undergraduate design team that used skWiki over the course of the concept generation and development phase of their course project. Our analysis of the team's sketching activity indicated instances of lateral and vertical transformation between participants, indicating collaborative exploration of the breadth and depth of the design space. Using skWiki for this evaluation also demonstrated it to be an effective research tool to investigate such collaborative design processes.

Automated content analysis software tools have significantly aided in the study of design processes in the recent past. However, they suffer from the lack of domain knowledge and insight that a human expert can provide. In this paper, we adopt the use of text visualization techniques that help in gaining insights and identifying relevant patterns from the results obtained through a content analysis software. We motivate our approach with the observation that examining overall patterns in data aids us significantly in identifying interesting and relevant details concerning specific contexts in the data. We use the proposed approach to study the effect of adopting Laseau's "design funnel" of alternating divergent and convergent design processes among student teams in a toy design course, and compare it to student teams that follow a free brainstorming process. We demonstrate the application of lexical dispersion plots and text concordances as a means to further examine the output of a conventional content analysis tool, and use these techniques to separate patterns from anomalies. We identify cases of concept consistency across teams using the dispersion plots, and identify cases of multiple word senses through text concordances. Finally, we present insights that were obtained through these visualizations and propose contexts for further studies of the data.

The interdisciplinary nature of engineering design and the pervasiveness of electronics in most products has made it necessary for practitioners of "design thinking" to understand electronics and embedded systems, in order to expand their concept exploration space. This poses a significant challenge for mechanical engineers, whose knowledge of electronics is typically limited. A course in mechatronics is available to enhance this knowledge, however it is taught separate from product design and CAD/Toy Design, and students often do not get the opportunity to combine these elements. With an open source microcontroller platform (ArduinoTM) that allows for easy programming, we see an oppportunity to blend design thinking into a larger domain of engineering. In this paper, we propose a platform that would simplify the incorporation of electronics into a design. The proposed platform will utilize the ArduinoTM, along with a modular architecture for designing electronic systems, as well as modular program segments for controlling these systems which can be easily customized to meet student requirements. This will enable students in a toy design course to integrate electromechanical systems into their designs, while at the same time providing useful electronic knowledge which can be used in their future careers. The toy design projects utilize a Problem-Based Learning [1, 2] approach that will allow students to familiarize themselves with the synthesis and programming of these systems.

Engineering graduates in advancing economies are not only expected to have engineering knowledge, but also use them in creative and innovative ways. The importance of visual thinking has been critical for creativity and innovation in design. However, today's engineering students are proficient in detailed design tools but lacking in conceptual design and ideation, and engineering curricula needs to develop a more effective framework for teaching visual thinking. In this paper, we report our efforts to embed principles of design thinking and visual thinking practices, like McKim's "seeing, imagining and drawing" cycle [1]. We use a toy design course in mechanical engineering for our pilot study as a scaffold for introducing these principles in an engaging, creative, and fun environment. We introduced freehand sketching as a tool for visual thinking during the design and communication of concepts. We also report the impact of these changes through information gleaned from student feedback surveys and analysis of design notebooks. We use our findings to propose ways to provide the students with a set of balanced techniques that help them in visual thinking, communication, and design. An improved implementation of this experience is discussed and future work is proposed to overcome barriers to thinking and communication.