A Collaborative, Interactive and Context-Aware Drawing Agent for Co-Creative Design

TL;DR

CICADA is a novel collaborative drawing agent that interacts with users by developing partial sketches into complete designs, emphasizing diversity, flexibility, and human-like quality in co-creative design tasks.

Contribution

This paper introduces CICADA, a new interactive, context-aware drawing system that supports co-creative design, addressing the gap in existing models focused on one-off image generation.

Findings

CICADA produces sketches comparable to human quality.

Enhanced diversity in generated sketches.

Effective handling of user modifications and ongoing collaboration.

Abstract

Recent advances in text-conditioned generative models have provided us with neural networks capable of creating images of astonishing quality, be they realistic, abstract, or even creative. These models have in common that (more or less explicitly) they all aim to produce a high-quality one-off output given certain conditions, and in that they are not well suited for a creative collaboration framework. Drawing on theories from cognitive science that model how professional designers and artists think, we argue how this setting differs from the former and introduce CICADA: a Collaborative, Interactive Context-Aware Drawing Agent. CICADA uses a vector-based synthesis-by-optimisation method to take a partial sketch (such as might be provided by a user) and develop it towards a goal by adding and/or sensibly modifying traces. Given that this topic has been scarcely explored, we also introduce a way to evaluate desired characteristics of a model in this context by means of proposing a diversity measure. CICADA is shown to produce sketches of quality comparable to a human user's, enhanced diversity and most importantly to be able to cope with change by continuing the sketch minding the user's contributions in a flexible manner.