Bridging the Analog and Digital Worlds in Support of Design Knowledge Life Cycle

A decision delay can translate into significant financial and business losses. One way to accelerate the decision process is through improved communication among the stakeholders engaged in the project. Capturing, transferring, managing, and reusing data, information, and knowledge in the context it is generated can lead to higher productivity, effective communication, reduced number of requests for clarification and time-to-market cycle. This paper presents TalkingPaper as a ubiquitous collaborative environment that facilitates synchronous and asynchronous communicative events. The TalkingPaper prototype bridges the paper and digital worlds. It transforms the dialogue and the paper & pencil sketches into indexed and synchronized digital audio-sketch content that can be streamed ondemand over the Web to all stakeholders for rapid knowledge transfer and decision-making.