Central Concerns and Questions

In the current age of mass-produced, pre-packaged products, the motivation to express our own vision is disappearing. Yet there are signs that this trend is reversing. The rise of “Web 2.0” and the flood of user created multi-media content, such as animations, movies, games, and even user interfaces, shows that our desire to create has never been far from the surface. However, current creative tools are geared toward professional designers, with steep learning curves and complex interfaces that focus on appearance instead of content. We seek to help novice and amateur designers create more engaging multi-media experiences.

Emerging Ideas and Initiatives

An engaging experience is one that holds an audience's attention. Expert designers do this by seeking to understand their audience's language and expectations and then tailoring their message for their audience. This is a laborious process that requires experimentation, and focusing too early on appearance discourages amateurs from trying more than one idea. To enable less experienced designers to make prototypes of higher-quality artifacts more easily, design tools can be optimised to make experimentation extremely easy and fast, and they can focus on content rather than appearance.

Selected Publications

[1] Richard C. Davis, Brien Colwell, and James A. Landay. K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” Sketch Pad for Novice Animators. Proceedings of CHI 2008, Florence, Italy, April 5-10, 2008, pp. 413-422. ( PDF, Video )

[2] Richard C. Davis, T. Scott Saponas, Michael Shilman, and James A. Landay. SketchWizard: Wizard of Oz Prototyping of Pen-based User Interfaces. Proceedings of UIST'07, Newport, RI, October 7-10 2007, pp. 119-128. ( PDF, Video )

Projects, Presentations and Posters

1. Richard C. Davis, K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” Sketch Pad for Novice Animators (poster)
2. Richard C. Davis, K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” Sketch Pad for Novice Animators. School of Computing, National University of Singapore , Singapore , February 25th, 2009. (presentation)
3. K-Sketch Web Site

External Collaborations and Industry Linkages

1. DUB Group, University of Washington