Drawing practices in image-enabled collaboration

Advances in image-making tools have greatly increased our opportunities to use images to collaborate. Much current research in the area of visualization focuses on building systems to generate visual representations of large data sets. A small but growing subset of this research focuses on collaborative aspects of information and data visualization. In order to expand the scope of collaborative visualization research, a qualitative study examined the role that spontaneous drawing practices play in face-to-face conversations. Empirical examples describe the creation and use of drawing as a form of social interaction. This study provides a methodological and theoretical basis for viewing the process of generating a visual artifact in a collaborative context from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective. Findings identify affordances of drawing related to both material object (artifact) and communicative performance (activity). Implications for design are discussed in terms of both refined heuristics and enhanced features for image-enabled collaborative tools.