The Electronic Cocktail Napkin- computer support for working withdiagrams

The Electronic Cocktail Napkin is an experimental computer-based environment for sketching and diagramming in conceptual design. The project's goal is to develop a computational drawing environment to support conceptual designing in a way that leads smoothly from diagrams to more formal and structured representations of schematic design. With computational representations for conceptual designs, computer supported editing, critiquing, analysis, and simulation can be employed earlier in the design process, where it can have a greater impact on outcomes. The paper describes the Electronic Cocktail Napkin program -its recognition and parsing of diagrams and management of spatial constraints, its drawing environment, and two experimental query by diagram schemes for retrieving information from architectural databases.