Surfing for Inspiration: digital inspirational material in design practice

Interactive Layout Transfer

“…Designers routinely seek, curate, and utilise design examples, or examples of known good designs, in their work [14,20]. However, because design examples are often scattered across different sources -across the internet and on personal folders [16] -it may be practically hard to find relevant examples. Further, even after identifying an example, designers still require manual effort to transform the draft at hand while ensuring that the final design adheres to all expected design principles and organisation-specific rules.…”

Interactive Exploration of Large-Scale UI Datasets with Design Maps

“…They take breaks and change environments to incubate new ideas and obtain distance from solutions at hand. Recently, designers have been reported to turn to online resources for inspiration (Koch et al, 2018). They use search engines and online social design platforms, such as Behance, Pinterest, and Dribble.…”

“…These offer example galleries, curated metadata and discussion on examples, as well as search functionality. Paradoxically, even if there is an inexhaustible number of examples available in these sources, it is nonetheless challenging to find examples that are relevant to the task at hand (Koch et al, 2018). In particular, finding relevant user interface (UI) examples, especially in large-scale datasets, is a highly challenging task because UIs have aesthetic and functional properties that are only indirectly reflected by their corresponding pixels and associated metadata.…”

“…However, while design examples can help a designer 'on a roll' to explore the design space more, or get ideas 'when stuck', researchers have raised concerns with digital example galleries (Lee et al, 2010;Marks et al, 1997). Existing examples found in the web often lack additional information such as author, purpose, method, or approach used, which hampers understanding and evaluating of the quality and credibility of the example (Koch et al, 2018). Moreover, examples are not often related to the design at hand and their hit rate may be low overall.…”

May AI?

“…Traditionally, designers browse through physical magazines, explore art or colleagues' work [22]. While search engines and dedicated online services have become prominent sources, they rely on verbalization of ideas via sequential queries, which may counter the visual and abstractive nature of ideation [24]. It further limits "serendipitous encounters", crucial to the original mood board method [22].…”