Online whiteboards are becoming a popular way to facilitate collaborative design work, providing a free-form environment to curate ideas. However, as templates are increasingly being used to scaffold contributions from non-experts designers, it is crucial to understand their impact on the creative process. In this paper, we present the results from a study with 114 students in a large introductory design course. Our results confirm prior findings that templates benefit students by providing a starting point, a shared process, and the ability to access their own work from previous steps. While prior research has criticized templates for being too rigid, we discovered that using templates within a free-form environment resulted in visual patterns of free-form curation where concepts were spatially organized, clustered, color-coded, and connected using arrows and lines. We introduce the concept of "Free-form Templates" to illustrate how templates and free-form curation can be synergistic.

翻译：在线白板正逐渐成为促进协作设计工作的流行工具，它提供了一个自由形态的环境来策划创意。然而，随着模板越来越多地被用于引导非专业设计师的贡献，理解其对创意过程的影响至关重要。本文展示了一项针对大型设计入门课程中114名学生的研究结果。我们的结果证实了先前的研究发现：模板通过提供起点、共享流程以及从先前步骤中访问自身作品的能力，对学生有所裨益。尽管先前研究批评模板过于僵化，但我们发现，在自由形态环境中使用模板会形成自由策划的视觉模式，其中概念通过空间组织、聚类、颜色编码以及箭头和线条连接来呈现。我们引入“自由形式模板”这一概念，以说明模板与自由策划如何能够协同增效。