Hypersketching

Abstract

There are empirical and theoretical reasons for believing that current CAD does not adequately support the early, conceptual stages of design. Hand-done design drawing has a several advantages over current, CAD-based approaches to generating form in these stages. One advantage is the indeterminacy of hand drawing--i.e., its abstractness and ambiguity. Another is a non-destructive drawing process, where new drawings are created without modifying old ones. A third is designers’ creation of large collections of inter-related drawings-i.e., graphical hyperdocuments. A fourth is the unobtrusive character of conventional drawing tools. We have created two prototypes that incorporate these features into a new type of CAD based on sketching with electronic pens on LCD tablets. The first prototype, called HyperSketch, is a stand-alone system that simulates tracing paper. It creates a hypermedia network in which the nodes are sketches and the links are primarily traced-from relationships recorded automatically by the system. The second prototype adds the HyperSketching functionality to our existing PHIDIAS HyperCAD system. This aids design by using the sketches to index and retrieve multimedia information that is useful for a variety of design tasks.