SUMMARY
In this paper, the authors propose a flexible workflow to enable the creation of visual blends. The authors specifically focus on the ‘Hybrid’ visual metaphor wherein objects are ‘fused together’. The authors propose a blending design pattern ‘Single Shape Mapping’ which can be used to blend two objects with similar shapes and blends all of one object into a part of the other one. The workflow consists of different microtasks including brainstorming, annotation, and evaluation. The entire workflow consists of 6 steps – brainstorming, finding images, annotating images, detecting images that blend together (by the system), automatic synthesizing of the blends, evaluating the blends (by the user) – and the users were made to watch a 15-minute training session before they started with the task. The authors evaluated the task decomposition with three studies namely decentralized collaboration, group collaboration on blends for messages, and novice users with and without VisiBlends. The authors found that VisiBlends was helpful as it enabled people to meet all of the constraints associated with visual blending.
REFLECTION
I enjoyed reading this paper and found the motivation for this study to be very nice. It was interesting to see how creativity, which is predominantly a human affordance, was being presented in a mixed-initiative setting. I liked the examples that were chosen throughout the paper and found that they helped me to better understand the challenges associated with blending images (orange + healthy, with apple as the health symbol) as well as to appreciate the images that were generated well (orange + healthy, with a health symbol that was not food).
The study on ‘decentralized collaboration’ reminded me of the paper on ‘The Knowledge Accelerator: Big Picture Thinking in Small Pieces’ which was discussed last week. I liked the study on the ability of novice users to create these visual blends with and without VisiBlends. I also agree that having a flexible iterative workflow similar to the one used in the paper is very useful as it aids the users to identify issues with the original results and then improve upon the same.
I liked that the authors discuss how creative design problems also have patterns in the ‘Discussion’ section. I think it would be very interesting to see a similar study be conducted in the domain of story writing. Text data poses a multitude of challenges and having a decomposed workflow such as this proposed for writing would be very interesting – especially given that authors may have very varied writing styles.
(Interestingly, “Wash your hands. It’s the smart move” was one of the messages used as part of this study.)
QUESTIONS
- What modifications can be made to the interface design of the VisiBlends website to better aid users in creating these visual blends? What are the main drawbacks of the existing interface?
- The authors propose the decomposed workflow for ‘Hybrid’ visual metaphors. Is it possible to create such a workflow for the ‘Simile’ or ‘Contextual Metaphor’ visual blends? What kind of changes would be required to be made to enable this?
- The authors conduct a study to evaluate the usage of this system by novices. What results would have been yielded if the users of the system were people with a background In marketing, but who were not graphic designers? Would their approach to the problem have been different?
Great comment! I also very enjoyed reading this paper because it not only put up with a novel perspective that creative could have some pattern but also introduce me to a new world of design. The only drawback I am thinking of is that maybe the user would be spoiled by the system so that they would not think proactively. This also the point made in one of the previous papers we discussed before. Thus, my recommendation regarding this problem is that maybe we should give users more freedom to select the kind of blend they expected.
I agree with Nan’s idea. The system should give users more freedom. Instead of only provide ideas, the users should also be able to upload images and mark the shapes of the objects. They know about what they need better than those crowd workers and are willing to do this kind of tasks if they are able to.
I liked this paper too, and while I agree with the other commenters that it might end up stifling a bit of creativity, it would be fantastic tool for a layperson to use to spice up an article they were writing rather than be for some ad copy.
I thought an improvement to the interface they could create is to make sure that people upload different shapes in some way – maybe suggest something along the lines of “I notice you’re not uploading many rectangular images, perhaps try a circle or other shape?” That way they’d avoid the problem they had with shape matching errors.
Great reflection and questions! I agree with other commenters too that it might stifle creativity, but would be a great tool for novices to improve articles. I also think an improvement to the interface might be to allow different users to use the interface in different flows. What do you think might change if experts were involved instead of novices?
Your second question is definitely interesting! And I am guessing we will be needing more complex algorithms for “more complex” blends. Of course, that will have implications on how the users use these algorithms as we saw that participants iterated based on their knowledge of the algorithm.