Supportive Interfaces for Creative Visual Thinking

Current graphical user interfaces (GUI) are too cumbersome to use in the early stage of creative activities. Nested menus, arrays of buttons, and dialog boxes interfere with the flexible exploration. As a result, especially in visual task domain, most people rely on traditional pen and paper for the initial exploration, and move to the computers later. Our goal is to provide fluent user interfaces that can facilitate these early, exploratory stages of visual thinking activity on computational systems. Basic idea is to make interfaces transparent so that the user can directly interact with the target visual representations without using menus and buttons. We will introduce three example systems. Pegasus interactively beautifies freeform drawings satisfying possible geometric constraints. Teddy allows the user to design freeform three-dimensional objects by drawing their silhouette shapes. Flatland provides various computational supports for simple note-taking activity on an office whiteboard. We report the lessons learned from these experimental systems, and clarify the open problems.