DreamSketch: Early Stage 3D Design Explorations with Sketching and Generative Design
Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Tovi Grossman, Hyunmin Cheong, Ali Hashemi, and George Fitzmaurice. 2017. DreamSketch: Early Stage 3D Design Explorations with Sketching and Generative Design. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology(UIST ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 401-414. DOI: https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/10.1145/3126594.3126662
Summary:
In this paper, the author presented us with a novel 3D design interface called DreamSketch. The user coarsely defines the problem by sketching the design context. Then, a generative design algorithm produces multiple solutions that are augmented as 3D objects in the sketched context. The primary challenges of leverage the advantages of both sketching and generative design is to accommodate the vague, ambiguous, and unfinished quality of sketches within a CAD environment. The workflow in the DreamSketch is defining the problem, navigate results and iterate. As for the result, participants responded positively to the overall workflow, capabilities, and approach to 3D design using this software. However, there are still some shortcomings existed in this novel software, like the time consuming of computing, and user interface needs to be refined. At last, this software could encourage engineers to think more like designers and designers to think more like the engineers. This is really a great idea.
Reflection:
I think the design that combines the sketch and CAD together as a hybrid design medium is really a good idea. This software targets at the features of the sketching. There are disadvantages as below: the first sketches are ambiguous. Because sketches are drawn quickly and dirty, which lacks refining. Second, sketches are incomplete. This means sketches still need lots of work before considered as a final work. For advantages, sketch express ideas, which is really important for future works.
I really like the design of the user interface in DreamSketch. The UI of DreamSketch consists of the main canvas, a toolkit menu, and a GUI menu for drawing canvas navigation in 3D, drawing tools, visualization, and parameter controls. The arrangement of these interfaces is clear and the user can find what they want easily. This is a good example of a user interface for designing drawing tools for me.
Discuss:
For the discussion, the computationally expensive is really a serious problem, how would authors solve this problem? Using other algorithms? I think for the design process, long time spent on waiting for software running and computing is really annoyed for most designers.
Another problem is as mentioned in the paper, the user study is quite short, just 30~60 minutes. In my opinion, the design of sketch needs time for inspirations. Creating some new sketches in a short time is not a good idea. And also, according to some participants’ responses, who lack the experience of sketching, the user interface should be improved for people who have not used these kinds of software before. I think this is really a problem.