Sketchy: Drawing Inspiration from the Crowd

Abstract

In-person user studies show that designers draw inspiration by looking at their peers' work while sketching. To recreate this behavior in a virtual environment, we developed Sketchy, a web-based drawing application where users sketch in virtual rooms and use the "Peek" functionality to gain ideas from their peers' sketches in real-time. To assess if "Peek" supports individual creativity through finding inspiration, students from a Human-Computer Interaction class sketched user interface design tasks in two studies. Study 1 compares creativity measures with and without Peek between two groups of students, where self-reports reveal Peek increases satisfaction with their final sketch and better supports individual creativity. Study 2 took place in a large classroom, where 90 students, all with Peek enabled, completed different design tasks. Peeking led students to report an intention to change their sketch 18% of the time in Study 1 and 17% of the time in Study 2. Student designers were influenced by sketches that seem closer to completion, contain more details, and are carefully drawn. They were also about three times more likely to clear their canvas and start over if they found a sketch inspirational. Furthermore, sketches created by students with more sketching and design experience influence less experienced student designers. This work explores the directions and benefits of incorporating digital peeking to support individual creativity within a student designer's classroom experience to create more satisfactory final sketches.

Debiased Label Aggregation for Subjective Crowdsourcing Tasks

“…DLA integrates a user's voting history across a dataset to reweight their binary labels to reduce the overall user bias when aggregating labels to create ground-truth labels. We study and compare DLA against majority voting on an public real-world dataset of highly subjective data [74]. Taken together, our experiments suggest that DLA shows better characterization of the labeled items and results in significant improvements over majority voting based on several performance metrics; see Figure 2.…”

“…These traits of labeling behavior are particularly critical when labeling subjective data since complete label agreement towards a given item happens very rarely [25]. For example, while it can be trivial to identify whether a picture contains some object, subjective tasks can become incredibly difficult, such as determining if a sketch is inspirational [74] or identifying if a human face is real or artificial [3].…”

Lessons Learned in the Development of an Online 6-3-5 Digital Design Tool for Distributed Idea Generation

“…from mouse to digital pen or touchscreen would be a first step. It is reported that mood and visual stimulus can affect the creativity of outcomes from a 6-3-5 activity [8], and the suggested changes would encourage more creative outcomes. The low sample size of the students who had used 6-3-5 before impacted the results.…”

“…However, the novelty of the concepts is questionable and significantly less concepts are generated by team members than with physical 6-3-5. Sketchy [8] is a digital design tool that allows designers to draw ideas on their own mobile or computer device individually, but they can be inspired by other collaborators using a 'peek' feature. 'Peek' allows a design team member to quickly watch another team member who is also drawing in real-time.…”

Interactive Exploration of Large-Scale UI Datasets with Design Maps

“…The collection and curation of design examples, or sources serving as a starting point to influence a final design (Eckert and Stacey, 2000), is an important aspect of creative design practice and ideation (Herring et al, 2009;Stolterman, 2008). Designers traditionally seek inspiring design examples from external sources, such as design magazines, books, websites, as well as from colleagues and other peers' work (Gonçalves et al, 2014;Vasconcelos and Crilly, 2016;Wallace et al, 2020). They take breaks and change environments to incubate new ideas and obtain distance from solutions at hand.…”