Longitudinal Studies of Augmented Notebook Usage Informing the Design of Sharing Mechanisms

Designers today use a variety of artifacts — both physical and digital — in the course of documenting their work. A resulting tension is that physical and digital media have significantly different affordances and organizing metaphors. Augmented paper interactions promise to mitigate some of this tension, yet there have been few real-world evaluations of these systems. To investigate their potential value for design, we studied two longitudinal deployments of augmented paper interactions with student design teams. Across two ten-week-long studies, 56 design students used the system, authoring over 4,000 pages of content in the course of their class work; this paper reports on their design habits and adoption patterns. We discuss the salient benefits (integrated digital repository for sketches and photographs), shortcomings that led to research insights (support for sharing physical and digital content), and barriers that persisted across both studies (perceived and actual costs of adoption discourage use). Author