Supporting Informal Design with Interactive Whiteboards

Whiteboards serve an important role in supporting informal design, providing a fluid and flexible medium for collaborative design. Interactive whiteboards offer the potential for enhanced support for manipulating content, managing sketches, and distributed work, but little is known about how this support affects the practice of informal design. To understand the opportunities and challenges, we first conducted a literature review, identifying 14 behaviors that occur during informal design. We then designed an interactive whiteboard system to support all of these behaviors and deployed the system to three groups of designers. Through usage logs and interviews, we examined the effects of interactivity on whiteboard use across a wide spectrum of design behaviors, identifying ways in which interactive whiteboards support the practices used in physical whiteboards and where they enable designers to work more effectively.