An Artificial Intelligence Approach for Interpreting Creative Combinational Designs
This addresses the challenge of automating the analysis of creative designs for researchers and practitioners in design innovation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing AI methods.
The study tackled the problem of computationally interpreting creative combinational designs by identifying 'base' and 'additive' components, achieving accuracies of 87.5% and 80% respectively.
Combinational creativity, a form of creativity involving the blending of familiar ideas, is pivotal in design innovation. While most research focuses on how combinational creativity in design is achieved through blending elements, this study focuses on the computational interpretation, specifically identifying the 'base' and 'additive' components that constitute a creative design. To achieve this goal, the authors propose a heuristic algorithm integrating computer vision and natural language processing technologies, and implement multiple approaches based on both discriminative and generative artificial intelligence architectures. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted on a dataset created for studying combinational creativity. Among the implementations of the proposed algorithm, the most effective approach demonstrated a high accuracy in interpretation, achieving 87.5% for identifying 'base' and 80% for 'additive'. We conduct a modular analysis and an ablation experiment to assess the performance of each part in our implementations. Additionally, the study includes an analysis of error cases and bottleneck issues, providing critical insights into the limitations and challenges inherent in the computational interpretation of creative designs.