Victor Sardenberg

Victor Sardenberg, Theron Burger, Mirco Becker Link! The paper describes a research experiment of incorporating quantitative aesthetic evaluation and feeding the metric back into a parametric model to steer the search within the design space for a high-ranking design solution. The experiment is part of a longer-standing interest and research in quantitative aesthetics. A web platform inspired by dating apps was developed to retrieve an aesthetic score of images (drawings and photographs of architectural projects). The app and scoring system was tested for functionality against an existing dataset of aesthetic measure (triangles, polygon nets). In the actual experiment, an evolutionary algorithm generated images of design candidates (phenotypes) and used the aesthetic score retrieved by the ``crowd'' of app users as a fitness function for the next generation/population. The research is in the tradition of empirical aesthetics of G. T. Fechner (Fechner, 1876), using a web app to crowdsource aesthetic scores and using these to evolve design candidates. The paper describes how the system is set up and presents its results in four distinct exercises. Keywords: Quantitative Aesthetics, Social Media, Crowdsourcing, Collaborative Design, Human-Computer interaction