We have been studying the creativity-centered media to ensure that systems truly support creative and intelligent human activities. However, it has gradually become obvious that current advanced support systems have a serious drawback: instead of promoting creative work, they often discourage creativity or let us stop thinking. In this paper, we focus on the 3D sketch system that supports the design of 3D objects by drawing them in the 3D space directly, because they are not used by designers in real fields but are just treated as a mere attraction in an amusement park. We propose three design principles, “Memory Capacity”, “Cognitive Mode”, and “Life-size and Operability”, which make the 3D sketch system truly useful for the designer. They have been gradually derived in the accordance with our cognitive experiment and developing series of 3D sketch system.

Unlike documents, annotation for multimedia information needs to be input as text, not in the form of symbols such as underlines and circles. This is problematic with keyboard input for non-alphabetical languages, especially the East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese, because it is labor intensive and imposes a high cognitive load. This study provides a quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of making annotations by hand during a note-taking task in Japanese. Although the lessons learned from this study come from Japanese text input, they are also generally applicable to other East Asian Languages which use ideographic characters such as Chinese. In our study, we focused on both the ergonomic and cognitive aspects and found that during annotation and note-taking task input by hand is more effective than input by keyboard. Finally, we anatomized the keyboard input problem and discuss it in this paper.