Recognizing creative visual design: multiscale design characteristics in free-form web curation documents

Abstract

Multiscale design is the widely practiced use of space and scale to visually explore and articulate relationships. Free-form web curation (FFWC) is an approach to supporting multiscale design, involving creative strategies of collecting content, assembling it to juxtapose and organize, sketching, writing, shifting perspective to navigate, and exhibiting to share and collaborate. Our long term goal is to support design students with automatic, on demand feedback. We introduce a spatial clustering technique for recognizing multiscale design characteristics---scales and clusters---in FFWC documents. We perform quantitative evaluation to establish baseline performance. We contribute to human-centered AI by advancing fundamental human aspirations, through automatic recognizers of creative design, e.g., for representing and communicating abstract ideas. We develop implications, (1) for supporting people using content recognition in creative contexts, such as design education; (2) for overcoming design fixation with human-centered AI; and (3) for recognizing multiscale design characteristics.