D-Graph: AI-Assisted Design Concept Exploration Graph

TL;DR

D-Graph is an AI-powered tool that helps automotive designers generate unique, aesthetically meaningful two-adjective phrases by visualizing and filtering words based on frequency and similarity, aiding creative concept exploration.

Contribution

The paper introduces D-Graph, a novel AI-assisted visualization and retrieval tool that supports designers in creating original design-concept phrases using computational linguistic principles.

Findings

Participants using D-Graph showed a positive, but not significant, improvement in self-evaluated phrase quality.

Expert evaluations did not significantly differ between D-Graph and baseline.

A significant negative correlation was found between cosine similarity of words and expert ratings.

Abstract

We present an AI-assisted search tool, the "Design Concept Exploration Graph" ("D-Graph"). It assists automotive designers in creating an original design-concept phrase, that is, a combination of two adjectives that conveys product aesthetics. D-Graph retrieves adjectives from a ConceptNet knowledge graph as nodes and visualizes them in a dynamically scalable 3D graph as users explore words. The retrieval algorithm helps in finding unique words by ruling out overused words on the basis of word frequency from a large text corpus and words that are too similar between the two in a combination using the cosine similarity from ConceptNet Numberbatch word embeddings. Our experiment with participants in the automotive design field that used both the proposed D-Graph and a baseline tool for design-concept-phrase creation tasks suggested a positive difference in participants' self-evaluation on the phrases they created, though not significant. Experts' evaluations on the phrases did not show significant differences. Negative correlations between the cosine similarity of the two words in a design-concept phrase and the experts' evaluation were significant. Our qualitative analysis suggested the directions for further development of the tool that should help users in adhering to the strategy of creating compound phrases supported by computational linguistic principles.