Learning the Designer's Preferences to Drive Evolution

This paper presents the Designer Preference Model, a data-driven solution that pursues to learn from user generated data in a Quality-Diversity Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity (QD MI-CC) tool, with the aims of modelling the user's design style to better assess the tool's procedurally generated content with respect to that user's preferences. Through this approach, we aim for increasing the user's agency over the generated content in a way that neither stalls the user-tool reciprocal stimuli loop nor fatigues the user with periodical suggestion handpicking. We describe the details of this novel solution, as well as its implementation in the MI-CC tool the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer. We present and discuss our findings out of the initial tests carried out, spotting the open challenges for this combined line of research that integrates MI-CC with Procedural Content Generation through Machine Learning.Comment: 16 pages, Accepted and to appear in proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary and bio-inspired Computation, EvoApplications 202

Dimensions of Creative Evaluation: Distinct Design and Reasoning Strategies for Aesthetic, Functional and Originality Judgments

The datasets provided as part of DTRS-10 all relate to what may broadly be labeled as ‘design critiques’ in an educational context. As such, we chose to center our theoretical analysis on the evaluative reasoning taking place during expert appraisals of the design concepts that were being produced by industrial design students throughout the design process. This overall framing for our research allowed us to pursue a series of research questions concerning the dimensions of creative evaluation in design and their consequences for reasoning strategies and suggestions for moving further in the creative progress. Our transcript coding and analysis focused on three key dimensions of creativity, that is, originality, functionality and aesthetics. Each dimension was associated with a particular underpinning ‘logic’ that determined the distinctive ways in which these dimensions were seen to be evaluated in practice. In particular, our analysis clarified the way in which design dimensions triggered very different reasoning strategies such as running mental simulations, or making suggestions for design improvement, ranging from definitive ‘go/kill’ decisions right through to loose recommendations to continue to work on a concept for a period of time without any further directional steer beyond this general appraisal. Overall, we believe that our findings not only advance a theoretical understanding of evaluation behaviour that arises in design critiques, but also have important practical implications in terms of alerting expert design evaluators to the nature and consequences of their critical appraisals

"I like how it looks but it is not beautiful" -- Sensory appeal beyond beauty

Statements such as “X is beautiful but I don’t like how it looks” or “I like how X looks but it is not beautiful” sound contradictory. How contradictory they sound might however depend on the object X and on the aesthetic adjective being used (“beautiful”, “elegant”, “dynamic”, etc.). In our study, the first sentence was estimated to be more contradictory than the latter: If we describe something as beautiful, we often intend to evaluate its appearance, whereas it is less counterintuitive to appreciate an appearance without finding it beautiful. Furthermore, statements including “beautiful” appeared more contradictory than those including “elegant” and “dynamic”, pointing to its greater evaluative component. When related to artworks, sentences could appear less contradictory due to readers’ consideration of the divergence between conventional beauty and art-related sensory pleasures that can even include negative valence. Such ambivalence might be more frequent in art-objects than in other artefacts. Indeed, in our study, sentences referring to artworks were estimated to be less contradictory compared to sentences referring to other artefacts. Meanwhile, an additional small group of graphic design students showed a less clear difference between art-related and non-art-related sentences. We discuss the potential influence of art experience and interest as well as theoretical and methodological challenges like the conceptualization of beauty

Equipoise: An Animated Short Film About Positiveness and Negativity.

Equipoise is an animated short about positiveness, negativity and the opposite but complementary relationship between them. The two opposite attitudes of an individual’s personality not only affect but also establish emotions, decisions and behaviors. Positiveness reinforces positive thinking while pessimistic assumptions and hardship are driven by negativity. A person who has an imbalanced mind may live in pain or lead to high risks. To have a great mental condition, both positiveness and negativity have to be involved to establish the balance. However, the importance of negativity, in one case, pessimism was frequently ignored as a result of education that focuses on positiveness or optimism for most of the time. The animated short Equipoise depicts the complementarity of two forces and introduces the concept of balance from an objective standpoint. The two forces are balancing for different circumstances and no matter who is leading, the other is always supporting