About the series
12:00- 1:00pm Distinguished Lecture (NSF Stafford I, Room 110)
2:30- 4:00pm Interactive Session: skWiki & Juxtapose Technologies (NSF Stafford I, Room 110)
Title: New Tools to Foster Creative Collaboration During Design
Abstract: The 21st century requires us to work together to rapidly design new and complex solutions to our most pressing challenges. However, our current tools and technologies overwhelmingly privilege text-based forms of communication and limit collaboration in non-text based media. As a result, much of today's innovative design work still occurs through pen-and-paper sketching, which is challenging to share and systematically build upon. Driven by current theories of learning, collaboration and creativity, we present a new suite of tools - called skWiki (or Sketch Wiki, pronounced squeaky) and Juxtapoze - that usher in a new era of creative collaboration in the design process.
skWiki, a web application framework for collaborative creativity in digital multimedia projects, provides a rich viewer/editor architecture for all media types, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs. Juxtapoze, a clipart composition workflow that further supports creative search and serendipitous discoveries based on a workflow of a drawn, shape-based searching, editing, and composition process. In combination, these technologies have the potential for transforming the design process into a more collaborative, creative, and efficacious endeavor.
BIOS:
Karthik Ramani is the Donald W. Feddersen Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the School of Mechanical Engineering, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (By Courtesy) at Purdue University. He earned his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1985, an MS from Ohio State University, in 1987, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991, all in Mechanical Engineering. Among his many awards he received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Initiation Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Ralph Teetor Educational Award from the SAE, and the Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award from SME. In 2006 he won the innovation of the year award from the State of Indiana. He serves in the editorial board of Elsevier Journal of Computer-Aided Design and ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. In 2008 he was a visiting Professor at Stanford University (computer sciences) as well as a research fellow at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC). He also serves on the SBIR/STTR advisory board within the NSF Industrial Innovation and Partnerships Program. In 2006 and 2007, he won the Most Cited Journal Paper award from Computer-Aided Design and the Research Excellence award in the College of Engineering at Purdue University. He won the Outstanding Commercialization award in 2009 and distance education award in 2013 from Purdue University, ASME Kos-Ishii Toshiba award in 2013, ASME Best Paper Award from technical committees four times. In 2012 his labs paper won the all conference best paper award from ASME computers and information in engineering for "Handy Potter". While his research lies at the intersection of mechanical engineering and information science and technology, the areas span design and manufacturing, shape understanding using machine learning, geometric computing and human-computer interaction and interfaces with shapes and sketches. A major area of emphasis in his group is computer support for early design, shape searching, sketch-based design, cyber and design learning with a particular emphasis on learning sciences, sustainable design and manufacturing, and natural user interfaces for shape modeling. Since 2010 many of his labs papers have appeared in highly ranked conferences such as IEEE CVPR, ACM SGP, Computer Graphics Forum, ACM UIST, and ACM SIGCHI
Kylie Peppler is an assistant professor of Learning Sciences at Indiana University. An artist by training and deeply rooted in the arts education community, she explores the relationships between individual, social and cultural aspects of knowledge creation though the process of creative production. Central to this investigation is Papert's notion of Constructionism, which posits that learning happens most effectively through the creation of artifacts that are then shared with the community for feedback and reflection. Her work seeks to elaborate on the applicability of this theory particularly for visual, performing and new media arts.
Peppler was recently commissioned by the Wallace Foundation to write the report, New Opportunities for Interest-Driven Arts Learning in a Digital Age (2013). Additional book publications include The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities (Teachers College Press), Textile Messages: Dispatches from the World of E-Textiles and Education (Peter Lang), New Creativity Paradigms: Arts Learning in the Digital Age (Peter Lang), as well as a four-book series, Interconnections: Understanding Systems Thinking Through Digital Design (MIT Press, 2014). Peppler leads the Make-to-Learn initiative of the MacArthur Foundation, which leverages DIY culture, digital practices, and educational research to advocate for placing making, creating, and designing at the core of educational practice. Beginning with her work on the NSF-sponsored (ITR - 0325828) development and early study of the visual programming language, Scratch (scratch.mit.edu), she now investigates the ways that youth creatively engage with computation beyond the screen through aspects of physical computing and crafting (#0855886) as well as designs new learning environments and educational applications. Most notable of these design efforts is BioSim, a participatory simulation enhanced with e-puppetry that provides a context for classroom teachers to enable embodied, first-person explorations of complex biological systems. She is currently the lead PI on a new NSF Cyberlearning grant to pursue this work at a larger scale.
WEBINAR:
The Webinar will be held from 12:00pm to 1:00pm Eastern Time on Wednesday May 14, 2014.
Please register at: https://nsf.webex.com/nsf/j.php?ED=255273482&RG=1&UID=0&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D by 11:59pm Eastern Time on Tuesday May 13, 2014.
After your registration is accepted, you will receive an email with a URL to join the meeting. Please be sure to join a few minutes before the start of the webinar. This system does not establish a voice connection on your computer; instead, your acceptance message will have a toll-free phone number that you will be prompted to call after joining. In the event the number of requests exceeds the capacity, some requests may have to be denied.
