CoSke: An Exploration in Collaborative Sketching

Collaboration is a helpful tool for inspiring creativity and promoting idea generation. To assist sketch collaboration using digital sketching, we developed CoSke (short for Collaborative Sketching), a server application that lets multiple users, each sketching on their own client, draw collaboratively on a shared canvas. We performed a user study to investigate how users react to varying methods of collaborative interaction, comparing the shared digital canvas to traditional pen and paper methods, as well as same room versus distinct locations. User surveys recorded participants' qualitative opinions about the methods. Points of communication such as hand gestures, eye contact, and contribution were recorded by proctors. The results from these metrics along with user study comments suggest that paper-based methods may impede collaboration due to the physical constraints inherent in a shared physical drawing space, and that speech is vital to effective sketch collaboration. Proctor recordings also provide insight into which face-to-face methods of collaborative communication can be translated into the digital realm. Further examination of the data collected from this and future studies will provide further insight to these questions and guidance on how developers can envision and build a system that will truly provide for the capabilities and natural flow of face-to-face human sketching communication.