Article:

The paper describes a research experiment of incorporating quantitative aestheticevaluation and feeding the metric back into a parametric model to steer thesearch within the design space for a high-ranking design solution. The experimentis part of a longer-standing interest and research in quantitative aesthetics. Aweb platform inspired by dating apps was developed to retrieve an aesthetic scoreof images (drawings and photographs of architectural projects). The app andscoring system was tested for functionality against an existing dataset of aestheticmeasure (triangles, polygon nets). In the actual experiment, an evolutionaryalgorithm generated images of design candidates (phenotypes) and used theaesthetic score retrieved by the ``crowd'' of app users as a fitness function for thenext generation/population. The research is in the tradition of empiricalaesthetics of G. T. Fechner (Fechner, 1876), using a web app to crowdsourceaesthetic scores and using these to evolve design candidates. The paper describeshow the system is set up and presents its results in four distinct exercises.