Interactive System for Automatic Design of Textile Patterns

Co-Proposer	Dr Claudia Eckert, Engineering Design Centre, University of Cambridge
Software	Language with interface building tools and good graphics
Covers	Interface development, artificial intelligence, creativity
Skills Required	Programming, some interest in graphics, some interest in artificial intelligence
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ??? Programming ????

Brief Description

Artificial intelligence can be used to enhance human creativity. One approach to doing this is exploit the human ability to make perceptual judgements of beauty, balance, elegance, interestingness, and so on, by generating designs that people can reject or choose for editing or further development. A design is used as the starting point for generating variations, either a bit different or a bit more complex, by applying transformation rules to parts of the description of the design. The simplest application of this approach is designing textile patterns.

The objective of the project is to develop an interactive system for designing simple textile patterns. This will start with a simple pattern, and will apply transformation rules to the description of the pattern to generate a set of variants of it. These new designs are displayed on screen, and the user can select one or more of them for another round of variant generation. The user repeats this process until happy with one of the designs.

The project will require the development of (1) a symbolic description formalism for simple textile patterns; (2) a module that reads pattern descriptions in this formalism and generates bitmaps (or converts the description into a form that can be turned into a bitmap by commercial software); (3) a user interface that allows the user to look at several patterns, and select one or more for further development; and (4) a module for generating new pattern descriptions from old using transformation rules.

Extensions

The usability of the system would be enhanced by the ability to look at different designs together to compare them, or to backtrack to resume development from an earlier design.

The usability of the system would be enhanced by an editing facility, that allows the user to change elements of the pattern such as colour or stripe width by hand.

It might be useful for the user to select different types of transformations, represented in different transformation rulesets.

You should start with the simplest and easiest patterns: stripes and tartans. But what other kinds of patterns can you include in your system?

Cross-Reference

My project Interactive Evolution of Cellular Automata is about doing essentially the same thing using arrays of cellular automata to generate patterns.

Back to