A study of people's sketching habits in GIS

Sketching is traditionally associated withdoodling simple strokes on a piece of paper.Only few professionals outside of design andthe fine arts have recognized the expressivepower of this intuitive modality. However,sketching seems particularly well suited tocapture objects and situations in a spatialenvironment, such as geographic space. To learnmore about the techniques and strategies peopleuse when sketching, a survey of sketching wasconducted. The study showed that paper andpencil sketches contain mostly simple andabstract objects that are composed of only fewstrokes. The spatial configuration of a sceneis primarily expressed through the topologicalordering of objects relative to each other.Metric relationships are used to refine spatialconfigurations. These and other findingssuggest that sketching is an appropriatemodality to interact with a computer where onewants to describe and capture objectconfigurations in a spatial environment, suchas a geographic information system (GIS).