Online whiteboards are becoming a popular way to facilitate collaborative design work, providing a free-form environment to curate ideas. However, as templates are increasingly being used to scaffold contributions from non-experts designers, it is crucial to understand their impact on the creative process. In this paper, we present the results from a study with 114 students in a large introductory design course. Our results confirm prior findings that templates benefit students by providing a starting point, a shared process, and the ability to access their own work from previous steps. While prior research has criticized templates for being too rigid, we discovered that using templates within a free-form environment resulted in visual patterns of free-form curation where concepts were spatially organized, clustered, color-coded, and connected using arrows and lines. We introduce the concept of "Free-form Templates" to illustrate how templates and free-form curation can be synergistic.
@article{arxiv.2305.00937,
title = {Freeform Templates: Combining Freeform Curation with Structured Templates},
author = {Stephen MacNeil and Ziheng Huang and Kenneth Chen and Zijian Ding and Alex Yu and Kendall Nakai and Steven P. Dow},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.00937},
year = {2023}
}