Design notebook

CHI 2025 · First author · 52-participant study

DesignWeaver

A workspace for turning vague product ideas into inspectable design dimensions, richer prompts, and better comparison across generated concepts.

Sirui Tao, Ivan Liang, Cindy Peng, Zhiqing Wang, Srishti Palani, and Steven P. Dow

Paper Code

The interface decision

Put the vocabulary next to the image.

Novices know what they like when they see it, but a blank prompt box asks them to name it first. The study began from that gap.

Baseline

A standard text-to-image setup

Baseline study interface showing participants creating product design prompts without dimensional scaffolding
Figure 4. The baseline interface mimics a standard text-to-image setup, excluding scaffolding components.
Open original baseline interface

DesignWeaver

Dimension Palette & Interactive Prompt Box

DesignWeaver interface overview showing a prompt box, dimension palette, image gallery, and favorite folder
Figure 1. The interface brings together (A) a prompt box, (B) a dimension palette, (C) an image gallery, and (D) a favorite folder.
Open original DesignWeaver interface

52 novice designers

DesignWeaver Research Results

A user study involving 52 novice designers revealed that DesignWeaver:

Creative Exploration

Participants rated DesignWeaver higher on creative exploration and continuous improvement of design ideas.

Bar chart comparing average survey ratings between DesignWeaver and baseline conditions
Figure 6, left. Participants rated DesignWeaver higher than the Baseline on ease of idea-to-prompt conversion, design space exploration, prompt generation, concept refinement, and iterative design improvement.
Open original survey ratings

Design Diversity

DesignWeaver participants created semantically more diverse images than the Baseline.

Distribution plot comparing image similarity scores for generated chair concepts
Figure 6, right. DesignWeaver participants created semantically more diverse images than the Baseline.
Open original image similarity plot