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This paper explores improving sketching skills and reducing the inhibition to sketch for student designers. In the first study, students were taught sketching skills through an in-class workshop. The effect was evaluated using a pre-mid-post test ( n = 40). In the second study, students were led through art activities to reduce their inhibition to sketch. The effect was tested using another pre-mid-post test ( n = 26). The first study found sketching skills increased, but declined with disuse. The second study found reduced inhibition immediately after the workshop, an increase after the sketch skills workshop, and a decrease over the semester. This suggests that sketch training and inhibition-reducing exercises are effective in the short term, but must be emphasized over time for a permanent change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present Sketcholution, a method for automatically creating visual histories of hand-drawn sketches. Such visual histories are useful for a designer to reflect on a sketch, communicate ideas to others, and fork from or revert to an earlier point in the creative process. Our approach uses a bottom-up agglomerative clustering mechanism that groups adjacent frames based on their perceptual similarity while maintaining the causality of how a sketch was constructed. The resulting aggregation dendrogram can be cut at any level depending on available display space, and can be used to create a visual history consisting of either a comic strip of highlights or a single annotated summary frame. We conducted a user study comparing the speed and accuracy of participants recovering causality in a sketch history using comic strips, summary frames, and simple animations. Although animations with interaction may seem better than static graphics, our results show that both comic strip and summary frame significantly outperform animation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]