Attribute-Aware Generative Design With Generative Adversarial Networks

The designers' tendency to adhere to a specific mental set and heavy emotional investment in their initial ideas often limit their ability to innovate during the design ideation process. The shrinking time-to-market and the growing diversity of users' needs further exacerbate this gap. Recent advances in deep generative models have created new possibilities to overcome the cognitive obstacles of designers through automated generation or editing of design concepts. This article explores the capabilities of generative adversarial networks (GAN) for automated, attribute-aware generative design of the visual attributes of a product. Specifically, a design attribute GAN (DA-GAN) model is developed for automated generation of fashion product images with the desired visual attributes. Experiments on a large fashion dataset signify the potentials of GAN for attribute-aware generative design, verify the ability of editing attributes with relatively higher accuracy and uncover several key challenges and research questions for future work.