Naturally conveyed explanations of device behavior

Designers routinely explain their designs to one another using sketches and verbal descriptions of behavior, both of which can be understood long before the device has been fully specified. But current design tools fail almost completely to support this sort of interaction, instead not only forcing designers to specify details of the design, but typically requiring that they do so by navigating a forest of menus and dialog boxes, rather than directly describing the behaviors with sketches and verbal explanations. We have created a prototype system, called assistance, capable of interpreting multimodal explanations for simple 2-D kinematic devices. The program generates a model of the events and the causal relationships between events that have been described via hand drawn sketches, sketched annotations, and verbal descriptions. Our goal is to make the designer's interaction with the computer more like interacting with another designer. This requires the ability not only to understand physical devices but also to understand the means by which the explanations of these devices are conveyed.