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 process

How DesignWeaver Works

Dimensions come from the brief, from images people upload, and from what the model generates, so the vocabulary grows with the work.

  1. Upload Design Brief

    Client persona, requirements, and moodboard go in; the system extracts three initial dimensions.

  2. Build AI Prompt

    Designers click tags or type text, then the prompt is formatted into a more complete design request.

  3. Generate And Inspect Designs

    Designers compare three rendered images and use Info to surface new tags from the outputs.

  4. Iterate And Refine

    Designers add or remove dimensions, regenerate, and collect favorites for side-by-side comparison.

System diagram showing how DesignWeaver ingests design documents, recommends dimensions, generates images, and supports iteration
Figure 2: Overview of the iterative design process using DesignWeaver. The process involves four main stages: (1) Ingest the design document to extract initial dimensions and tags, (2) Refine and recommend dimensions to generate prompts, (3) Use prompts to render and refine images, and (4) Iterate based on new dimensions and tags inspired by the generated images.
Open original system diagram

Evidence

DesignWeaver Research Results

In a controlled study, participants wrote richer prompts and produced more diverse, expert-aligned chair concepts.

52 novice designers took part. With DesignWeaver their prompts were longer and more specific, and experts rated their chairs more novel than the baseline's.

Inspect the study comparison