Human-AI Co-Creation in Fashion Design Ideation and Sketching: An Empirical Study

Abstract

The fashion industry is well known for its ever-changing nature, which results from a variety of factors, includ- ing consumer preferences, cultural shifts, technological ad- vancements, and design trends. To address this, the fashion industry has recently proactively incorporated generative AI into the design process. However, how and why profes- sional fashion designers use generative AIs for ideation and visual exploration has been empirically under-researched. Our research aims to uncover the intricate relationship be- tween designers’ creative inspirations and the outputs gen- erated by Midjourney in particular. Three workshops were carried out with fashion design practitioners. Our findings highlight important aspects of this generative design pro- cess such as how professional fashion designers visually explore the results; decision-making about further iteration for idea development in exploration, and empirical criteria for evaluating the quality of the sketches produced.