Senthil Chandrasegaran

• Ph.D
• Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology

Sketching for conceptual design has traditionally been per-formed on paper. Recent computational tools for conceptual de-sign have leveraged the availability of hand-held computing de-vices and web-based collaborative platforms. Further, digital sketching interfaces have the added advantages of storage, du-plication, and sharing on the web. We have...

Abstract Design protocol analysis is a technique to understand designers’ cognitive processes by analyzing sequences of observations on their behavior. These observations typically use audio, video, and transcript data in order to gain insights into the designer’s behavior and the design process. The recent availability of sophisticated sensing tec...

Despite its grounding in creativity techniques, merging multiple source sketches to create new ideas has received scant attention in design literature. In this paper, we identify the physical operations that in merging sketch components. We also introduce cognitive operations of reuse, repurpose, refactor, and reinterpret, and explore their relevan...

Sketches are much more than marks on paper; they play a key role for designers both in ideation and problem-solving as well as in communication with other designers. Thus, the act of sketching is often enriched with annotations, references, and physical actions, such as gestures or speech---all of which constitute meta-data about the designer's rea...

Group Support Systems provide ways to review and edit shared content during meetings, but typically require participants to explicitly generate the content. Recent advances in speech-to-text conversion and language processing now make it possible to automatically record and review spoken information. We present the iterative design and evaluation o...

The growing sophistication of Large Language Models allows conversational agents (CAs) to engage users in increasingly personalized and targeted conversations. While users may vary in their receptiveness to CA persuasion, stylistic elements and agent personalities can be adjusted on the fly. Combined with image generation models that create context...

Creative conversation among designers and stakeholders in a design project enables new ideas to naturally originate and evolve. Language allows for the exchange of values, priorities, and past experience whilst keeping solution forms usefully ambiguous. Yet there is a danger that only the language of people directly involved in the design process g...

In today’s world, the advantages of data-enabled design are undeniable, increasing the performance of organisations drastically by informing and inspiring the design process. While organisations seem to be more experienced with quantitative data for evaluative purposes, they do struggle to use data as creative material to inspire the design process...

Multidimensional data is often visualized using coordinated multiple views in an interactive dashboard. However, unlike in infographics where text is often a central part of the presentation, there is currently little knowledge of how to best integrate text and annotations in a visualization dashboard. In this paper, we explore a technique called F...

Wearable technologies draw on a range of disciplines, including fashion, textiles, HCI, and engineering. Due to differences in methodology, wearables researchers can experience gaps or breakdowns in values, goals, and vocabulary when collaborating. This situation makes wearables development challenging, even more so when technologies are in the ear...

Design thinking has an important role in STEM education. However, there has been limited research on how students engage in various modalities throughout the design process in hands-on design tasks. To promote middle school students’ engineering literacy, it is necessary to examine the use of design modalities during design. Using a case study appr...

Visual data storytelling is gaining importance as a means of presenting data-driven information or analysis results, especially to the general public. This has resulted in design principles being proposed for data-driven storytelling, and new authoring tools being created to aid such storytelling. However, data analysts typically lack sufficient ba...

Creating Spatial Computing (SComp) artifacts (including Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, and Ambient Intelligent artifacts) is a rapidly-emerging domain in need of new design methodologies. In this paper, we examine whether and how ethics are procedurally integrated into the creations of SComp artifacts. After an introduction to t...

A necessary condition of understanding how designers work is understanding how designers talk. In this paper we show how new methods of linguistic data analysis are beginning to reveal insights into the general nature of design conversations. For the first time we combine design activity data collected over 30 years by the Design Thinking Research...

Analysis of large, high-dimensional, and heterogeneous datasets is challenging as no one technique is suitable for visualizing and clustering such data in order to make sense of the underlying information. For instance, heterogeneous logs detailing machine repair and maintenance in an organization often need to be analyzed to diagnose errors and id...

Visual data storytelling is gaining importance as a means of presenting data-driven information or analysis results, especially to the general public. This has resulted in design principles being proposed for data-driven storytelling, and new authoring tools being created to aid such storytelling. However, data analysts typically lack sufficient ba...

Dynamic networks—networks that change over time—can be categorized into two types: offline dynamic networks, where all states of the network are known, and online dynamic networks, where only the past states of the network are known. Research on staging animated transitions in dynamic networks has focused more on offline data, where rendering strat...

Dynamic networks -- networks that change over time -- can be categorized into two types: offline dynamic networks, where all states of the network are known, and online dynamic networks, where only the past states of the network are known. Research on staging animated transitions in dynamic networks has focused more on offline data, where rendering...

Current text visualization techniques typically provide overviews of document content and structure using intrinsic properties such as term frequencies, term co-occurrences, and sentence structures. However, these visualization techniques do not provide conceptual overviews that consider domain-relevant knowledge that is needed when examining docum...

Mind mapping is a popular way to explore a design space in creative thinking exercises, allowing users to form associations between concepts. Yet, most existing digital tools for mind mapping focus on authoring and organization, with little support for addressing the challenges of mind mapping such as stagnation and design fixation. We present Spin...

Engineering design typically occurs as a collaborative process situated in specific context such as computer-supported environments, however there is limited research examining the dynamics of design collaboration in specific contexts. In this study, drawing from situative learning theory, we developed two analytic lenses to broaden theoretical ins...

This paper examines students’ design exploration strategies in a sustainability-focused structural optimization task. The task was set up as a two-criteria optimization problem with the goal of simultaneously minimizing the weight and an environmental indicator for a pedal bracket design. Forty-two students in an undergraduate computer-aided design...

The societal demand for inspiring and engaging science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students and preparing our workforce for the emerging creative economy has necessitated developing students’ self-efficacy and understanding of engineering design processes from as early as elementary school levels. Hands-on engineering design ac...

The rapid rise in technologies for data collection has created an unmatched opportunity to advance the use of data-rich tools for lifecycle decision-making. However, the usefulness of these technologies is limited by the ability to translate lifecycle data into actionable insights for human decision-makers. This is especially true in the case of su...

We present Co-3Deator, a sketch-based collaborative 3D modeling system based on the notion of "team-first" ideation tools, where the needs and processes of the entire design team come before that of an individual designer. Co-3Deator includes two specific team-first features: a concept component hierarchy which provides a design representation suit...

We present an argument for using visual analytics to aid Grounded Theory methodologies in qualitative data analysis. Grounded theory methods involve the inductive analysis of data to generate novel insights and theoretical constructs. Making sense of unstructured text data is uniquely suited for visual analytics. Using natural language processing t...

In this study, we examined the development of middle school students’ engineering design thinking in a toy design workshop. The introduction of engineering design modules in middle school has been shown to aid understanding of scientific concepts and design thinking. Additionally, using concrete objects to augment abstract concepts and symbols has...

Direct-touch tablets are quickly replacing traditional pen-and-paper tools in many applications, but not in case of the designer’s sketchbook. In this paper, we explore the tradeoffs inherent in replacing such paper sketchbooks with digital tablets in terms of two major tasks: tracing and free-hand sketching. Given the importance of the pen for ske...

We present skWiki, a web application framework for collaborative creativity in digital multimedia projects, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs. skWiki overcomes common drawbacks of existing wiki software by providing a rich viewer/editor architecture for all media types that is integrated into the web browser itself, thus avoiding...

Juxtapoze is a clipart composition workflow that supports creative expression and serendipitous discoveries in the shape domain. We achieve creative expression by supporting a workflow of searching, editing, and composing: the user queries the shape database using strokes, selects the desired search result, and finally modifies the selected image b...

Automated content analysis software tools have significantly aided in the study of design processes in the recent past. However, they suffer from the lack of domain knowledge and insight that a human expert can provide. In this paper, we adopt the use of text visualization techniques that help in gaining insights and identifying relevant patterns f...

The interdisciplinary nature of engineering design and the pervasiveness of electronics in most products has made it necessary for practitioners of “design thinking” to understand electronics and embedded systems, in order to expand their concept exploration space. This poses a significant challenge for mechanical engineers, whose knowledge of elec...

Engineering graduates in advancing economies are not only expected to have engineering knowledge, but also use them in creative and innovative ways. The importance of visual thinking has been critical for creativity and innovation in design. However, today’s engineering students are proficient in detailed design tools but lacking in conceptual desi...

Design is a complex process which requires several tools, knowledge and procedures in order to be successful. Although technology provide designers with new and improved tools, those tools should be placed in the right stage during the design process, otherwise they could have negative effects. For example, creativity and innovation not necessarily...