# Camera Obscurer: Generative Art for Design Inspiration

## TL;DR

The paper introduces Camera Obscurer, a mobile app that uses visual similarity search on generated abstract images to inspire design ideas by providing diverse visual stimuli based on user-selected seed images.

## Contribution

It presents a novel mobile tool that leverages generated abstract art and visual similarity search to assist designers in finding inspiration from their surroundings.

## Key findings

- Crowdsourcing experiment estimated user confidence in retrieved images.
- Pilot study showed the app effectively inspired design ideas.
- Identified future improvements for the system.

## Abstract

We investigate using generated decorative art as a source of inspiration for design tasks. Using a visual similarity search for image retrieval, the \emph{Camera Obscurer} app enables rapid searching of tens of thousands of generated abstract images of various types. The seed for a visual similarity search is a given image, and the retrieved generated images share some visual similarity with the seed. Implemented in a hand-held device, the app empowers users to use photos of their surroundings to search through the archive of generated images and other image archives. Being abstract in nature, the retrieved images supplement the seed image rather than replace it, providing different visual stimuli including shapes, colours, textures and juxtapositions, in addition to affording their own interpretations. This approach can therefore be used to provide inspiration for a design task, with the abstract images suggesting new ideas that might give direction to a graphic design project. We describe a crowdsourcing experiment with the app to estimate user confidence in retrieved images, and we describe a pilot study where Camera Obscurer provided inspiration for a design task. These experiments have enabled us to describe future improvements, and to begin to understand sources of visual inspiration for design tasks.