Assessing Impacts of Digital Sketching on Concept Generation in Early Stage Design

Abstract

Digital design tools have become increasingly popular for facilitating designers with different steps of the design process because they can simplify or automate certain components of these steps. Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools have assisted designers with tasks such as modeling and visualizing products prior to production and easily creating engineering drawings for manufacturing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are being explored as collaborators who assist designers with interpreting sketches, assessing user needs, and generating ideas. Digital sketching tools such as tablets are a popular way for designers to easily create drawings that include different colors and styles and create multiple drafts of a concept by copying and pasting elements from previous sketches. However, the introduction of new tools into the design process always has broader implications for the design process. For instance, using CAD tools too early in the process can lead to design fixation and result in designers thinking a concept is more refined than it actually is due to the high quality and polish of the visualization created. Many researchers are now investigating when and how the best way to use AI tools in the design process is, but all struggle with the associated ethical implications of using the right training data and ensuring that the results are validated due to the serious risks related to misuse of AI. This dissertation focuses on one such digital design tool: tablets that are used for sketching. In an effort to expand the discipline’s understanding of how tablet use for sketching may enhance or detract from the design process, this thesis describes a series of studies investigating differences in ideation sketch attributes between tablets and paper/pen. Several of these sketch attributes have been linked with success in design- for instance, creating more sketches during ideation is linked with having better eventual design outcomes. This work investigates how sketch quality and quantity is impacted by the tools used for a short high level brainstorming session as well as a more detailed engineering concept generation task. Subsequently, it explores differences in content or novelty of ideas generated using each medium. Finally, it examines ways in which designers’ ideas evolve throughout the ideation process on both tablets and pen and paper. These aspects of the ideation process are important to understand, especially if the use of tablets leads to different results. The first area of investigation is related to exploring differences in sketch metrics including quantity, quality, and understandability between different sketching tools. These metrics have been found to be related to longer-term design outcomes and perceived creativity of concepts, so understanding the effect of the tablet on these sketch metrics can provide an understanding of how using a tablet for sketching could enhance or detract from overall design performance. The first study in this section investigates differences between pencil, pen, and tablet sketches during a short concept generation exercise and finds that sketch quality was highest for pencil drawings and lower for pen drawings but that tablet drawings do not significantly differ in quality from either pencil or pen drawings. Subsequently, a longer engineering design specific concept generation exercise was conducted to compare tablet sketching to pen and paper sketching. Here, there were no differences found in sketch quantity or understandability between paper and tablet. However, sketch quality, smoothness, and proportion/accuracy were all found to be higher on pen and paper than tablet. The second area of investigation explores whether or not using a tablet influenced designers’ ideation patterns. For instance, does the ability to copy and paste result in designers creating more interrelated ideas during brainstorming instead of exploring a variety of different design directions? There were no major differences found in the overall quantity of concept evolution present between tablet sketching and pen and paper sketching. However, tablet sketches across an ideation session had statistically significantly more concept chaining (related ideas appearing in a row) than paper and pen sketches despite having a similar number of related ideas overall. Additionally, concept chaining patterns were different for design prompts that had more than one functional requirement since not all ideas addressed all parts of the design prompt. However, for these prompts, the results from the primary functional requirement exhibited the same concept chaining patterns with more chaining present for tablet sketching than paper and pen sketching. The final area of investigation explores how designers’ ideas themselves are influenced by the sketching tool used through explorations of concept novelty and concept evolution. One study investigated novelty differences in concepts generated on tablet vs paper and found no correlation between the sketching tool used and the novelty of concepts generated. A second study was conducted to specifically compare designers’ own understanding of the interrelatedness of their ideas with the interrelatedness that could be assessed from the functional similarity of their sketches. Here, designers’ and reviewers’ assessments were found to not be aligned. In other words, sketches as standalone design artifacts did not communicate the extent of interrelatedness of concepts that was clear to the designer. Furthermore, the sketching tool used (tablet vs paper and pen) does not influence the level of agreement between designer and reviewer assessments. As such, using a tablet for sketching does not enhance or detract from the level of interrelatedness represented in sketches. These results suggest that assessing visual or functional similarity from sketches alone, regardless of the sketching tool used, may be insufficient in understanding all the relationship between a series of concepts as understood by the designer. Overall, these results indicate that using tablets as sketching tools does not have a clear significant benefit or burden on designers during ideation. It does not appear to enhance designers’ creative skills when it comes to sketch quantity or novelty though it did result in lower quality sketches, which has implications for the perceived creativity of concepts. Tablets were found to exhibit more instances of concept chaining than paper and pen sketches, though this trend did not persist when designers assessed their own concepts. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that it is critical to seek designer input in identifying similarities across sketches as functional similarity may not be aligned with designers’ own understanding of which of their ideas are related.