Enabling collaboration in the sketching domain

Sketching, although deceptively simple and seemingly primitive, is a powerful paradigm for designing and understanding many types of engineering systems. Many problem domains, such as designing electrical circuits, developing flow charts, and modeling simple mechanical devices, rely heavily on the ability to produce sketches efficiently in order to bring out the most salient features. Engineers working in these domains usually rely on pen and paper to generate their design sketches. They do this because more advanced technologies (such as notebook computers) are often unavailable, hard to learn, or cumbersome. It is important for engineers to collaborate with their colleagues while working on their sketches. Unfortunately, collaboration on sketches that exist only as pen and paper often proves to be tedious, requiring a minimum of a fax machine and scanner. Engineers could benefit from a more efficient means of collaboration when dealing with pen and paper sketches. The technology exists to improve the current situation and make pen and paper sketches a more effective medium for collaborative design. This thesis presents an implementation of a system that achieves three goals. First, the system allows two users to collaborate on the production of a sketch in much the same way they would collaborate when composing a document (with one user composing a sketch, then accepting or rejecting the changes of his collaborator).

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Smithnosky, Jesse Michael

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Randall Davis.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33362

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33362