Transcript Summary from Last Session - Center for Bits and Atoms

MIT Media Lab / The Center For Bits and Atoms
Meeting on Emergent Engineering
October 16, 2002
Product Evolution:
Computer-aided Recombinant Design
by Customer-driven Natural Selection
Kamal Malek
Noubar Afeyan
Evolving New Products
Step 1
Sequence the Product
Genome
Step 2
Create Recombinant
Designs and Expose them
to
“Natural Selection”
Step 3
Evolve the
“Fittest”
Confidential – Do not Duplicate
“Featurize “/ code the
product as a set of genes
Allow customers to
interact and choose
over the web
Customers/
developers select,
refine to produce
optimal designs
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Confidential – Do not Duplicate
So What’s the IDEA?
• IDEA: Interactive Design by Evolutionary
Algorithms (patents pending)
• Featurize design into genes and define alleles
• Consumer votes through web on relative
appeal of recombinant designs
• Preferences extracted through multiple
generations
• Collective action – segmentation – preference
extraction
• Results: Designs, Insights, Affinity, Innovation
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IDEA: Interactive Design by Evolutionary Algorithms
Recombinant Design
A set of design
direction
candidates and a
description of the
underlying design
intent
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Featurize candidates
extracting significant
design features and
attributes,
establishing an
allowable range of
variation, and
identifying design
constraints
This “featurization” is
encoded into the design
genotype in a way that
enables new design
candidates to be
generated automatically
within the vast design
universe defined around
the stated design intent
Evolutionary Algorithms Evolve the “Fittest” Designs
Evolutionary Algorithm
Initial Design Population
Fitness Assessment
Fitness Weighted
Breeding
Mutations
More Fit Population
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Discovery of preferred product designs and market segments
10 Features of 10 Options
Potential Design Population: 10 Billion Designs
Consumer Population
5,000 Heterogeneous Users
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Examples
PACKAGING
CONCEPT
TESTING
PRODUCTS
PRINT MEDIA
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PROMOTIONAL
DESIGN
Logo
Background
Model
Perfume Bottle
Ad Layout
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Crossover
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Mutation
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1,000+ Participants Explored A Design
Space Rendered In Real-Time
Potential Design Universe:
Over 340,000+
Possible Advertisements!
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1,000+ Participants Converged on 5 Major
Design Themes from a Design Universe of
340,000+
3
100%
4
1
5
2
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Summary
• First steps toward evolving products
through computation, customer
selection and web-based collectivism
• Insights into segmentation
• Enabling to designers, market
researchers as well as product
management
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