skWiki: A Multimedia Sketching System for Collaborative Creativity

by | Jan 20, 2014

Authors: Zhenpeng Zhao, Sriram Karthik Badam, Senthil Chandrasegaran, Deok Gun Park, Niklas Elmqvist, Lorraine Kisselburgh, and Karthik Ramani
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 26 - May 1, Toronto, Canada. pp. 1235-1244, 2014.
Paper
Video

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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Figure: Two parallel paths of concept sketches of a toy helicopter in skWiki. skWiki supports multiple co-existing revision histories for the same multimedia object. This is possible using paths, which track state changes over time and users to preserve complete operation history.

An overview of skWiki can be seen here:

Senthil

Senthil

Senthil Chandrasegaran is a postdoctoral scholar in the Visualization & Interface Design Innovation (VIDI) lab at the University of California, Davis. His work focuses on aiding collaboration through the capture and display of information generated in collaborative settings. Senthil was also a postdoctoral scholar at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park from April 2016 -- Aug 2017, where he worked on using visual analytics to aid qualitative analysis of data, and understanding physical and cognitive aspects of sketching during ideation. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue, where his work at the C Design Lab focused on understanding collaboration in the conceptual stages of design, by developing visual analytics-based techniques to make sense of multimodal design protocol data. In a past life before graduate school, he also worked in the automotive industry, specializing in interior trim design, and then in the heavy engineering industry, specializing in structural analysis and knowledge-based engineering. For more details, please visit his website [link].