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AI EDAM Special Issue, August 2011, Vol. 25, No. 3 The Role of Gesture in Designing

Design generally involves teams of designers collaborating on a design project. Although individual participants in a design team may make independent contributions to the project, collaborative design assumes that contributions are based on the interactions among different participants. This interaction occurs through various modalities (semiotic systems): verbal interaction has thus far received the most attention, both in research and in development, but graphical, gestural interaction and other modalities (gaze, posture, prosody) also play important roles. This Special Issue of AI EDAM focuses on the role of gesture in designing. Compared with verbal and graphical interaction, gestural expression has been barely analyzed in studies on collaborative design. Nevertheless, gesture has been shown to be used frequently by designers in their interactions and with varying functions (e.g., specification of design objects, as well as management of interactions). The analysis of gesture’s function in collaborative design has implications for environments that support remote collaborative design. Until now, they mainly supported pen-based pointing or command gestures, but if such environments are to effectively support designers collaborating from remote locations, representational and other types of gestures must also be visible and transmitted to the design partners. To advance this important topic, we seek papers that provide theoretical or empirical contributions to the role of gesture in designing, either in the context of computer supported collaborative design or as a precursor to designing effective collaborative design environments. The aim of this Special Issue on the role of gesture in designing is to further discussion at the intersection of theory and practice. Contributions are sought from artificial intelligence (AI), human–computer interaction (HCI), and computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) perspectives as well as cognitive science disciplines, such as psychology and pragmatics. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: