Despite its grounding in creativity techniques, merging multiple source sketches to create new ideas has received scant attention in design literature. In this paper, we identify the physical operations that in merging sketch components. We also introduce cognitive operations of reuse, repurpose, refactor, and reinterpret, and explore their relevance to creative design. To examine the relationship of cognitive operations, physical techniques, and creative sketch outcomes, we conducted a qualitative user study where student designers merged existing sketches to generate either an alternative design, or an unrelated new design. We compared two digital selection techniques: freeform selection, and a stroke-cluster-based "object select" technique. The resulting merge sketches were subjected to crowdsourced evaluation of these sketches, and manual coding for the use of cognitive operations. Our findings establish a firm connection between the proposed cognitive operations and the context and outcome of creative tasks. Key findings indicate that reinterpret cognitive operations correlate strongly with creativity in merged sketches, while reuse operations correlate negatively with creativity. Furthermore, freeform selection techniques are preferred significantly by designers. We discuss the empirical contributions of understanding the use of cognitive operations during design exploration, and the practical implications for designing interfaces in digital tools that facilitate creativity in merging sketches.@en

We present skWiki, a web application framework for collaborative creativity in digital multimedia projects, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs. skWiki overcomes common drawbacks of existing wiki software by providing a rich viewer/editor architecture for all media types that is integrated into the web browser itself, thus avoiding dependence on client-side editors. Instead of files, skWiki uses the concept of paths as trajectories of persistent state over time. This model has intrinsic support for collaborative editing, including cloning, branching, and merging paths edited by multiple contributors. We demonstrate skWiki's utility using a qualitative, sketching-based user study.

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Sketching for conceptual design has traditionally been performed on paper. Recent computational tools for conceptual design have leveraged the availability of hand-held computing devices and web-based collaborative platforms. Further, digital sketching interfaces have the added advantages of storage, duplication, and sharing on the web. We have developed skWiki, a tool that enables collaborative sketching on digital tablets using a web-based framework. We evaluate skWiki in two contexts, (a) as a collaborative ideation tool, and (b) as a design research tool. For this evaluation, we perform a longitudinal study of an undergraduate design team that used skWiki over the course of the concept generation and development phase of their course project. Our analysis of the team's sketching activity indicated instances of lateral and vertical transformation between participants, indicating collaborative exploration of the breadth and depth of the design space. Using skWiki for this evaluation also demonstrated it to be an effective research tool to investigate such collaborative design processes.

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