This project expands the capability of man-and-machine design through a creativity enhancing tool which amplifies the human design process by a novel fusion of interactive design with generative coevolution. The project involves the development of a Web-based, Interactive Evolutionary Algorithm to enhance the creativity of human users in designing complex three-dimensional forms, such as tensegrity architecture. A Co-Evolutionary User Modeling Algorithm capable of generating and maintaining a population of user models will serve as critic and collaborator for the human user. By learning the user's implicit goals and cognitive style we can accelerate the creative design process. A creativity-enhancing generative representation capable of encoding families of designs will capture underlying design dimensions. The design engine will be responsible for integrating the information from the evolved user models in order to automatically generate both surprising (critical) and predictable (collaborative) candidate designs for the human designer. The project develops measures of the creativity of the human-computer design system as a whole, by measuring the complexity and novelty of designs produced by the human user. The ability to enhance a user's creativity, and the ability to rapidly synthesize the demands of a large set of users, has immediate applications in several design domains outside of engineering and architecture. The enhancement of educational software, the design of consumer packaging, and artistic endeavors, among many others, all have much to gain from an open ended framework capable of collaborative discovery.
