| Today's designers generate content both on paper and online. Designers spread their work over physical and digital media, each of which has powerful---but distinct---sets of affordances. Recent work suggests that augmented paper interfaces can marry the ubiquity of paper interactions with the ease of search, annotation, and presentation afforded by digital representation. This dissertation examines novel ways to support and augment the practice of design through sharing and reappropriation of digitally captured design content.; The thesis of this dissertation is that an ecology for design that integrates augmented physical and digital tools can facilitate collaboration between designers and improve the visibility of design practice through the sharing and proactive presentation of design content. Our contributions are twofold: we study actual use of augmented tools for capture and access of visual design content, and we describe an approach for proactive display of example design materials that uses design dimensions as facets in selection and presentation algorithms.; To investigate the potential value of augmented tools for design, we developed the iDeas design ecology, which integrates physical notebooks with a digital faceted metadata browser that offers explicit annotation and sharing mechanisms, and conducted four studies with student design teams. Our findings indicate that, while there are clear benefits to tool use, such as increased excerpting and sharing of design material, users perceive high costs of maintenance and access control issues when using explicit capture and sharing tools.; The findings from these studies motivated our second tool, Adaptive Ideas, which explores the use of implicit mechanisms to improve visibility of example design resources. We describe a facet-based approach to selecting, presenting, and browsing design material adaptively, using decision-theoretic selection and end-user preference as inputs. Results from a laboratory study of an example-based web page builder indicate that proactive presentation of examples is useful in helping designers explore and understand spaces of design alternatives. |
