Design Combinatorics – scripting as a part of the design process
Choosing the right colors for a product is not an easy task, what usually happens is that a designer also doesn’t have enough time left to experiment with color because he spent it all on finding the perfect shape and solving out all technical requirements.
That’s were design combinatorics can come in. Dr woohoo, an artist based in the USA has post a video demonstrating a way of generating numerous color combinations from a given design concept. He is using the new capabilities of creating flash plugins to interact with applications like adobe illustrator CS4 through the use of ActionScript, a scripting language used primarily for the development dynamic websites on Flash.
Apparel Combinatorics from dr woohoo on Vimeo.
In this video, Dr. Woohoo demonstrates a little application that generates color and stroke variations on a vector rendering of an Adidas shoe. In the video, we can see that the application automatically exports jpeg files of an enormous amount of color variations of the design. How cool is that!? As you can see in the video, the amount of generated combinations is huge, so a new challenge arises, which is, having to sweep through the thousands of combinations to pick the ones you want. But anyway, having an app doing the color combinations and afterwards having you to pick the most interesting results can be a nice way to speed up the design process and to even surprise yourself.
I did a little research to find out how he made this little app, and by now I would guess that his combinatoric application was made possible through the new “PatchPanel technology” Adobe is releasing on their developer website:
“PatchPanel is a Flex library and set of services that make it possible for Shockwave® Flash® (SWF) files to work as Adobe Creative Suite CS3 and CS4 plug-ins. Flex developers can include this Flex library in their projects in order to create Flash plug-ins that access the ExtendScript Document Object Model (DOM) of Creative Suite applications through ActionScript objects.”
I was totally excited to see something I always wanted to have as a designer shine in front of my eyes. Let’s hope Dr. Woohoo brings more info on how to implement this.
And of course we totally dig the “evolutionary mindset” taking over the field of “design tools”. What about you? Do you have any wish for a “combinatoric” design application? What about automatically generating renderings out of CAD software like Maya or Cinema 4D? Those used on spending hours and hours tweaking light and material parameters for rendering 3D models in such programs know how nice it would be to have some “Charles Darwin twist to it”.
Render probes in Cinema 4D - Could finding the right light setting be easier?
For example, design combinatorics could have been of great use in the renderings of the folha seca skateboard. The image above shows a little overview on the rendering attempts in Cinema 4D before getting the right light and shadow results. It took me almost 3 hours..could it have been faster using design combinatorics to auto generate light, shadow, and material settings overnight and to have some options to choose from in the next morning? I wish..
With Adobe having bought Macromedia, we are seeing the merge of the capabilities of flash and its Creative Suite Softwares. As of in generative design, the combination of mathematical algorithms in the design process is opening up a whole new set of possibilities for designers and artists to express their creativity. Lets just hope that other design software companies will follow.
