Designing Rewards for Rewarding Designs: Demonstrating the Impact of Rewards on the Creative Design Process
Surabhi S Nath, Vindula Jayawardana, Monica Van, Matt Klenk, Shabnam Hakimi
TLDR
This paper explores how rewards influence creative design decisions, showing they encourage exploration and goal-alignment while maintaining diversity.
Key contributions
- Modeled 3D chair design as a Markov Decision Process to study reward impact.
- Found rewards encourage design space exploration and goal-aligned choices.
- Participants maximized goal-aligned rewards while maintaining design diversity.
- Goal type significantly influenced the perceived usefulness of rewards.
Why it matters
This research clarifies how rewards influence creative design, showing they can enhance exploration and goal achievement without sacrificing diversity. The findings provide valuable guidelines for designing effective feedback mechanisms in creative tasks.
Original Abstract
The creative design process involves transforming abstract goals into concrete outcomes through a series of decisions made under constraints. While such processes are commonly shaped by feedback like rewards, their impact on design decision making remains unclear. To better understand the role of rewards in the design process, we modeled a 3D parametric, goal-based chair design task as a Markov Decision Process. We tracked participants' decisions as they iteratively developed designs for an abstract design goal, and presented either a goal-aligned or goal-agnostic reward at every step. We tested the effect of these rewards on task behaviour and self-reported experience. With rewards, participants more thoroughly explored the design space, and maximised goal-aligned over goal-agnostic rewards while preserving diversity across designs. The nature of the goal also mattered, influencing participants' perception of the reward's usefulness. Building on these insights, we propose guidelines for designing effective feedback for design decision making.
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