Creative sketching partner: An analysis of human-AI co-creativity

Abstract

The creative sketching partner (CSP) is a proof of concept intelligent interface to inspire designers while sketching in response to a specified design task. With this interactive system we are studying the effect of an AI model of visual and conceptual similarity for selecting the Al's sketch response as an inspiration to the current state of the user's sketch. Specifically, we are interested in the user's behavior and response to an AI partner when engaged in a design task. By developing deep learning models of the sketches from a large-scale dataset, the user can control the amount of visual and conceptual similarity of the AI response when requesting inspiration from the CSP. We conducted a study with 50 design students to examine the participants' interaction behavior and their self reports. The participants' behavior maps into clusters that are co-related with three types of design creativity: combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational. Our findings demonstrate that the tool can facilitate ideation and overcome design fixation. In addition, analysis suggests that inspiration related to conceptual similarity is more associated with transformational creativity and inspiration related to visual similarity occurs more frequently during the detailed stages of design and is more prevalent with combinatorial creativity.