Conceptual Design as HyperSketching

Hand-done design drawing still has a several advantages over current, CAD-based approaches to generating form, especially in the early stages of design. One advantage is the indeterminacy of hand drawings—i.e. its abstractness and ambiguity. Another is a non-destructive drawing process, where new drawings are created without modifying old ones. A third is designers’ creation of large collections of inter-related drawings—i.e. graphical hyperdocuments. A fourth is the unobtrusive character of conventional drawing tools. These advantages might be taken as reasons for continuing to do early design on paper, but they also suggest ways in which CAD might be improved. We have created software prototypes that incorporate these features into a new type of CAD based on sketching with electronic pens on LCD tablets. One prototype, which we call HyperSketch II, simulates tracing paper in the sense that it enables the user to trace over previous drawings and to build stacks of traced over drawings. It also enables the user to create a hypermedia network in which the nodes are sketches and the links represent various relationships between sketches.