We have developed a novel technique for automatically retargeting content from one web page onto the layout of another. Enumerating multiple alternatives is critical to good design but is often tedious and time consuming. On the web, templates can be used to efficiently generate design alternatives. However, this limits designers to the corpus of pre-constructed templates. What if users could use any web page as a template? Using techniques from computer vision and machine learning literature, we have created a system in which any existing HTML page can be used as a template, and alternative, targeted designs can be generated efficiently and presented to users. We plan to deploy this tool as a web application to do large-scale empirical studies on how previously created examples can aid designers' creativity.

Design is an activity central to the human experience, but what is the magic behind great innovation? While designers report on the importance of practices such as prototyping, few empirical studies have investigated how such practices affect design quality. Our experimental research has yielded significant results, demonstrating the value of prototyping practices in a lab setting. Within a fixed time period, participants who rapidly iterate their designs produce better results and experience a larger increase in self confidence than people who prototype less. The goal of our work is to construct a conceptual framework for prototyping in design that will provide academics and business leaders with a clearer understanding of the value of prototyping while synthesizing theory and intuition from the behavioral sciences, engineering, and design.

Who will be writing software in the future and how will they be doing it? As computing becomes increasingly important in people's work and hobbies, a much broader range of people are engaging in programming. Understanding and building tools for professional software developers has a long history, but there has been relatively little research on how to support amateur, opportunistic programmers. Professor Scott R. Klemmer's NSF-funded research group at Stanford University is currently studying this problem. So far, they have done fieldwork with exhibit designers at San Francisco's Exploratorium Museum, and conducted several empirical studies on how these programmers use information resources while building software. Most notably, the Web has revolutionized the way these individuals write software. They build entire applications by iteratively searching for, understanding, and integrating pieces of functionality embodied in 15-line chunks of code! Right now, Professor Klemmer's research group is building a number of tools to support amateur programmers that embody and support this reliance on Web resources. The broad goal of this work is to make software development faster, easier, and less error-prone for a much larger population.