Pusan National University

A Korean researcher is exploring what a collaborative relationship between fashion designers and artificial intelligence (AI) would look like according to a January 6 ,2023 Pusan National University press release (also on EurekAlert but published January 12, 2023),

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the fashion industry has grown significantly in recent years. AI is being used for tasks such as personalizing fashion recommendations for customers, optimizing supply chain management, automating processes, and improving sustainability to reduce waste. However, creative processes in fashion designing continue to be human driven, mostly, and not a lot of research exists in the realm of using AI for designing in fashion. Moreover, studies are generally done with data scientists, who build the AI platforms and are involved with the technologic aspect of the process. However, the other side of this equation, i.e., designers themselves, are not roped into research often.
To investigate the practical applicability of AI models to implement creative designs and work with human designers, Assistant Professor Prof. Yoon Kyung Lee from Pusan National University in Korea conducted an in-depth study. Her study was made available online in Thinking Skills and Creativity on September 15, 2022, and subsequently published in Volume 46 of the Journal in December 2022.
“At a time when AI is so deeply ingrained into our lives, this study started instead with considering what a human can do better than AI,” says Prof. Lee, explaining her motivation behind the study. “Could there be an effective collaboration between humans and AI for the purpose of creative design?”
Prof. Lee started with generating new textile designs using deep convolution generative adversarial networks (DC-GANs) and cycle-GANs. The outputs from these models were compared to similar designs produced by design students.
The comparison revealed that though designs produced by both were similar, the biggest difference was the uniqueness and originality seen in the human designs, which came from the person’s experiences. However, the use of AI in repetitive tasks can improve the efficiency of designers and frees up their time to focus on more high-difficulty creative work. AI-generated designs can also be used as a learning tool for people who lack expertise in fashion want to explore their creativity. These people can create designs with assistance from AI. Thus, Prof. Lee proposes a human-AI collaborative network that integrates GANs with human creativity to produce designs. The professor also defined and studied the various elements of a complex system that are involved in human-AI collaborated design. She also went on to establish a human-AI model in which the designer collaborates with AI to create a novel design idea. The model is built in such a way that if the designer shares their creative process and ideas with others, the system can interconnect and evolve, thereby improving its designs.
The fashion industry can leverage this to foresee changes in the fashion industry and offer recommendations and co-creation services. Setting objectives, variables, and limits is part of the designer’s job in the Human-AI collaborative design environment. Therefore, their work should go beyond only the visual aspect and instead cover a variety of disciplines.
“In the future, everybody will be able to be a creator or designer with the help of AI models. So far, only professional fashion designers have been able to design and showcase clothes. But in the future, it will be possible for anyone to design the clothes they want and showcase their creativity,” concludes Prof. Lee.
We hope her dreams are very close to realization!

This is the first time I’ve seen a press release where the writer wishes well for the researcher. Nice touch!

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

How complex systems get engaged in fashion design creation: Using artificial intelligence by Yoon Kyung Lee. Thinking Skills and Creativity Volume 46, December 2022, 101137 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2022.101137

This paper is behind a paywall.

I’m not sure how I feel about the potential advent of yet another screen in my life. From an April 28, 2015 news item on Nanowerk,

The secret desire of urban daydreamers staring out their office windows at the sad brick walls of the building opposite them may soon be answered thanks to transparent light shutters developed by a group of researchers at Pusan National University in South Korea.

A novel liquid crystal technology allows displays to flip between transparent and opaque states — hypothetically letting you switch your view in less than a millisecond from urban decay to the Chesapeake Bay.

An April 28, 2015 American Institute of Physics (AIP) news release (also on EurekAlert) by John Arnst, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

The idea of transparent displays has been around for a few years, but actually creating them from conventional organic light-emitting diodes has proven difficult.

“The transparent part is continuously open to the background,” said Tae-Hoon Yoon, the group’s primary investigator. “As a result, they exhibit poor visibility.”

Light shutters, which use liquid crystals that can be switched between transparent and opaque states by scattering or absorbing the incident light, are one proposed solution to these obstacles, but they come with their own set of problems.

While they do increase the visibility of the displays, light shutters based on scattering can’t provide black color, and light shutters based on absorption can’t completely block the background. They aren’t particularly energy-efficient either, requiring a continuous flow of power in order to maintain their transparent ‘window’ state when not in use. As a final nail in the coffin, they suffer from a frustrating response time to power on and off.

Tae-Hoon Yoon’s group’s new design remedies all of these problems by using scattering and absorption simultaneously. To do this, Yoon’s group fabricated polymer-networked liquid crystals cells doped with dichroic dyes.

In their design, the polymer network structure scatters incident, or oncoming light, which is then absorbed by the dichroic dyes. The light shutters use a parallel pattern of electrodes located above and below the vertically aligned liquid crystals.

When an electric field is applied through the electrodes, the axes of the dye molecules are aligned with that of oncoming light, allowing them to absorb and scatter it. This effectively negates the light coming at the screen from its backside, rendering the display opaque – and the screen’s images fully visible.

“The incident light is absorbed, but we can still see through the background with reduced light intensity,” Yoon said.

In its resting state, this setup lets light pass through, so power need only be applied when you want to switch from transparent window view to opaque monitor view. And because the display’s on-off switch is an electric field, it has a response time of less than one millisecond – far faster than that of contemporary light shutters, which rely on the slow relaxation of liquid crystals for their off-switch.

Future work for Yoon’s group includes respectively increasing and decreasing the device’s transmittance at the transparent and opaque states, as well as developing a bi-stable light shutter which consumes power only when states are being switched, rather than maintained.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Fast-switching initially-transparent liquid crystal light shutter with crossed patterned electrodes by Joon Heo, Jae-Won Huh, and Tae-Hoon Yoon. AIP Advances 5, 047118 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4918277 Published April 28, 2015 DOI: 10.1063/1.4918277

This paper is open access.

The researchers have provided an image illustrating the window and the screen,

Caption: A dye-doped PNLC cell in the transparent and opaque states, placed on a printed sheet of paper. In the transparent state, the clear background image can be seen because of the high transmittance of this cell. In the opaque state, black color is provided and the background image is completely blocked, because the incident light is simultaneously scattered and absorbed. Credit: T.-H.Yoon/Pusan Natl Univ

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Pusan National University researchers explore artificial intelligence (AI) for designing fashion

Is that a window or an LCD (liquid crystal display) screen?