Camera Obscurer: Generative Art for Design Inspiration
This work addresses the need for creative inspiration in graphic design tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing image retrieval and generative art methods.
The authors tackled the problem of providing design inspiration by developing Camera Obscurer, an app that uses visual similarity search to retrieve abstract generated images from a large archive, supplementing user photos with new visual stimuli. They conducted a crowdsourcing experiment and pilot study to estimate user confidence and demonstrate the app's effectiveness in inspiring graphic design projects.
We investigate using generated decorative art as a source of inspiration for design tasks. Using a visual similarity search for image retrieval, the \emph{Camera Obscurer} app enables rapid searching of tens of thousands of generated abstract images of various types. The seed for a visual similarity search is a given image, and the retrieved generated images share some visual similarity with the seed. Implemented in a hand-held device, the app empowers users to use photos of their surroundings to search through the archive of generated images and other image archives. Being abstract in nature, the retrieved images supplement the seed image rather than replace it, providing different visual stimuli including shapes, colours, textures and juxtapositions, in addition to affording their own interpretations. This approach can therefore be used to provide inspiration for a design task, with the abstract images suggesting new ideas that might give direction to a graphic design project. We describe a crowdsourcing experiment with the app to estimate user confidence in retrieved images, and we describe a pilot study where Camera Obscurer provided inspiration for a design task. These experiments have enabled us to describe future improvements, and to begin to understand sources of visual inspiration for design tasks.