COSINE: A Sketch-Based Interactive Environment for Cooperative Design

Sketch plays an important role in the brainstorming of ideas. During conceptual design stage, designers use generally 2D graphical tools such as pencil and paper to draw a lot of sketchy documents for conveying ideas and communicating with other designers. Furthermore, conceptual design for complicated system involves a group of geographically distributed participants. However, most of current graphical design tools do not support such kind of collaborative sketching. This paper introduces a novel sketch-based interactive environment (COSINE) for cooperative design. Three key problems are addressed in this research: (1) how to represent and store sketch document for sketch-based cooperative design; (2) how does the system infer the designers´ intention and help them to finish the design process; (3) how to implement the communication between client and server. Solutions to these problems are proposed in this paper. A prototype system for cooperative UML class diagram design based on COSINE is also outlined