Thank you for watching our video.
I hope everyone's doing well.
Sketchy is an individual creativity support tool
whose peek feature enables hybrid in-person
and remote classroom sketching activities.
We've all experienced the ups and downs
of creating something.
This experience can be especially stressful
if you only had four minutes to design a new save icon.
Within UI/UX classrooms, sketching
can be a valuable part of the creative process.
However, in a physical classroom the process
of sketching and sharing typically do not co-occur.
Our preliminary observations show users physically peek,
or look at other sketches, during in-person sketching
tasks to gain inspiration.
For example, participant one stated,
"Seeing what effect works gives me inspiration.
If I do not see anything, I have to imagine it."
So what is inspiration?
Others have stated inspiration is hitting
on a solution in the moment.
From our observations, we aim for Sketchy
to capture and share this in-the-moment inspiration
through a digital form of peeking.
Thus enabling a flexible co-learning experience
among a group of students.
When peeking, the user will see the peek sketch update
in real-time as their peer progresses.
Simulating a real world sketching environment.
This allows cohorts of students to simultaneously
create and view inspirational stimuli from their peers.
This way, in the moment inspiration
can come from a student sitting five rows behind,
thus translating the physical experience of sharing sketches
into a broader digital setting.
This allows instructors to theoretically conduct
any type of sketching task.
Now, when a user digitally peeks,
how do we capture their intention or inspiration?
We ask a direct question derived from Oleynick's explanation
of the creative process.
Where the process of being inspired by,
gives way to the process of being inspired to,
which motivates action.
Following peeking, the user's next action
represents the actualization of their inspiration,
to bring an idea to life.
In this work, we define creativity
as mini-c or personal level creativity.
Determining how creative or inspired a student may be
is a difficult task, given the inherent ambiguity
and subjectivity of these concepts.
This is why we evaluate Sketchy by asking users
direct questions and following definitions from literature.
For example we evaluate digital peeking
versus physical peeking using the creativity support index.
Across our two studies, we use sketching in the peek feature
in a real world classroom sketching tasks
to answer several research questions.
Focusing on evaluating peeks effect on creativity, and when,
how, and what users find inspirational.
Study one compares creativity measures
between two separate groups of students with and without peek.
Study two took place in a large classroom
where 90 students, all with the peek
enabled, completed different sketching tasks.
We found sketching tasks are more effective when applying
unique constraints to the task.
For example not allowing users to sketch a floppy disk when
creating an icon that represents saving on a computer.
Students were recruited from a University level UI/UX class
to participate in sketching tasks during class.
Their participation was voluntary
and they did not receive a grade.
Study one compares digital and physical peeking using
a creativity support index.
Our studies show digital peeking,
compared to the physical baseline,
better supports overall creativity
by increasing users sense of collaboration, expression,
and feeling that the reward is worth the effort.
Students took ideas back to their sketches
across a variety of tasks in both studies.
For example the bottom right sketch,
designing a new save icon, imitates the box's 3D shape.
What influences peeking behavior?
Overall students sketch first and peek later.
While peeking occurred throughout,
students most commonly peek during the middle
of an activity.
The student's next action, after digitally peeking,
can indicate how seeing an inspirational sketch
might influence them.
We saw large increases in actions
where students undid strokes or started their sketch over
after seeing an inspirational sketch.
We analyzed every sketch by compiling a set of 26 features
from 2D stroke data.
We found the seven features listed
to be statistically significant.
This emphasis on global features points to the aesthetics
of the image as a whole.
It is less about the actual quality of a stroke
and more about the entire sketch.
Please read the full paper for additional results not covered
in this talk.
Our findings show that Sketchy supports an individual's
creativity by translating the benefits of physical peeking
into a digital setting, thus empowering an entire classroom
to both generate individual sketches and gain inspiration.
Please visit Sketchy's website to see a new version
with several key updates.
Sketchy is freely available for anyone to use.
Thank you.