From codes to patterns

Abstract

We explore the idea of making aesthetic decorative patterns that contain multiple visual codes. We chart an iterative collaboration with ceramic designers and a restaurant to refine a recognition technology to work reliably on ceramics, produce a pattern book of designs, and prototype sets of tableware and a mobile app to enhance a dining experience. We document how the designers learned to work with and creatively exploit the technology, enriching their patterns with embellishments and backgrounds and developing strategies for embedding codes into complex designs. We discuss the potential and challenges of interacting with such patterns. We argue for a transition from designing 'codes to patterns' that reflects the skills of designers alongside the development of new technologies.

Enabling Hand-Crafted Visual Markers at Scale

“…Dtouch, for example, employs a topological approach in which designers follow simple drawing rules (see below) to embed codes into hand-crafted images [5]. This provides designers with great flexibility for creating aesthetic designs, including those in which codes are disguised within wider patterns, but raises the problem of reliability [17]. Subsequent research explored how multiple codes might be embedded into larger images such as pieces of public Ôwall artÕ through the use of paths (scanning a sequence of codes), groups (scanning multiple codes at once) and by switching between colour filters so as to recognize different layers of codes within a design [22].…”

“…Alternatively the d-touch approach can scale to large numbers of codes in theory but there will be a practical limit to the fineness of detail that designers can cope with without some more automated support. Certainly, the examples of the d-touch topological approach have to date been limited to small code spaces [5,17]. The challenge of scale becomes even more difficult if a large number of designs need to share a common visual theme.…”

“…We chose this as previous research has shown it to be especially suited to use by graphic designers. Specifically, trained designers appreciated the openness of the d-touch rules, quickly learning how to draw valid markers before then figuring out how to creatively exploit the rules to embellish and otherwise disguise these within a variety of patterns [17]. It has also been shown to be usable by novice users with basic support [6].…”

“…Indeed, algorithmic approaches such as barcodes include redundant information in the form of checksums, an idea that has also been proposed for increasing the reliability of topological markers [17]. We therefore introduced a visual checksum mechanism into the drawing rules, but in a way that was intended to be comprehensible and open to designers.…”

“…Table 1 shows that this checksum prevents a large number of errors. It might seem like using an extra region would reduce the number of codes verses using that region for data but against other proposed validation methods (such as those in [17]) it actually produces more codes as it does not require gaps in the code space. Although not backwards compatible with existing dtouch applications it would be easy to modify them to accept these new markers alongside existing ones.…”