A study of people's sketching habits in GIS

Author: Blaser A.D.

Source: Spatial Cognition and Computation, Volume 2, Number 4, 2000 , pp. 393-419(27)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Sketching is traditionally associated with doodling simple strokes on a piece of paper. Only few professionals outside of design and the fine arts have recognized the expressive power of this intuitive modality. However, sketching seems particularly well suited to capture objects and situations in a spatial environment, such as geographic space. To learn more about the techniques and strategies people use when sketching, a survey of sketching was conducted. The study showed that paper and pencil sketches contain mostly simple and abstract objects that are composed of only few strokes. The spatial configuration of a scene is primarily expressed through the topological ordering of objects relative to each other. Metric relationships are used to refine spatial configurations. These and other findings suggest that sketching is an appropriate modality to interact with a computer where one wants to describe and capture object configurations in a spatial environment, such as a geographic information system (GIS).

Keywords: freehand sketching; human computer interaction; human subject testing; multi-modal user interfaces; spatial querying; spatial information retrieval in GIS

Language: English

Document Type: Regular paper

Affiliations: 1: National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469-5711, USA (E-mail: abl@esri.com)

Publication date: 2000-01-01