People often sketch when solving problems: we sketch to externalize some thought or to explain something to others. As system developers, designers and managers, we often start by sketching ideas on paper. Users also benefit a lot from sketching during meetings with system developers: they are able to make suggestions and explain concepts by drawing. It works because the sketch is not a contract: it is a proposal that can be modified, erased, built upon. The rough look of hand-made sketches suggests their provisional nature.

Send your sketches

So What is This About?

We are a group of researchers at Louvain Interaction Lab (LILab), and we are studying how to improve the design process of interactive systems with freehand drawing.

System designers usually start to design a system by exploring different solutions, and most of the time they make use of sketches to explain and discuss ideas. But the design need to be on a certain level of detail in order to be "formalized". In other words, they need to throw everything away to start to work on UI design tools, UML tools, etc.

Imagine to have a tool that is able to progressively refine the solution, starting from sketches. Our goal is to build such a tool, providing an environment in which designers can keep track of the whole lifecycle of a system design, starting by freehand sketching, explorating different solutions and evolving the drawings to formalized models. We've already started the development of this tool with Eclipse Sketch.

Participation

We are interested in your drawings, no matter how "drafty" they look. We are interested in observing what is represented and how. So we kindly ask you to send them to us together along with a short description. You can either scan the drawings or take a picture.

Send your sketches

This is a research project and we will use your drawings solely for research purposes and in anonymous way (your sketches will be anonimized as well, so things such as class names, product names will not be disclosed). You can also choose to allow us to reference part of your sketches in some eventual publication.

User interface layouts, UML models, abstract drawings, or everything that is drawn during meetings will be very useful to us.

Examples

Below are some examples of what we are looking for: all kinds of diagrams sketched during a software project development. You probably have them into post-its, pieces of paper even napkins. Scan them or photograph and send them over, it will help us a lot.