Designing Rewards for Rewarding Designs: Demonstrating the Impact of Rewards on the Creative Design Process
For researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction and design, this work clarifies how reward feedback shapes creative decision-making, offering guidelines for effective feedback design.
The study models a 3D chair design task as an MDP to examine how rewards affect design decisions. Results show that rewards increase exploration and maximize goal-aligned rewards while maintaining diversity, with goal type influencing perceived usefulness.
The creative design process involves transforming abstract goals into concrete outcomes through a series of decisions made under constraints. While such processes are commonly shaped by feedback like rewards, their impact on design decision making remains unclear. To better understand the role of rewards in the design process, we modeled a 3D parametric, goal-based chair design task as a Markov Decision Process. We tracked participants' decisions as they iteratively developed designs for an abstract design goal, and presented either a goal-aligned or goal-agnostic reward at every step. We tested the effect of these rewards on task behaviour and self-reported experience. With rewards, participants more thoroughly explored the design space, and maximised goal-aligned over goal-agnostic rewards while preserving diversity across designs. The nature of the goal also mattered, influencing participants' perception of the reward's usefulness. Building on these insights, we propose guidelines for designing effective feedback for design decision making.