ReVision: Supporting Designers'Interpretation and Exploration of Visuals in Concepts and Forms

2026-09-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge that novice designers often struggle to extract deep concepts and visual motifs from reference images, frequently falling into superficial imitation. To overcome this limitation, this work proposes ReVision, an AI-assisted design tool grounded in multimodal parsing techniques. ReVision achieves, for the first time, the decoupling of conceptual interpretation from visual motifs, enabling cross-space recombination and generative rendering to produce divergent visual variants. By bridging the gap left by existing tools in deep semantic association and expressive diversity control, ReVision effectively mitigates cognitive fixation induced by reference imagery. Consequently, it significantly enhances the divergency of design exploration, empowering novice designers to move beyond surface-level replication toward more innovative ideation.

Abstract

Visual designers get inspiration from references to expand their design space. They decompose what makes a reference evocative into conceptual and visual elements, ranging from explicit attributes such as objects and colors, to less readily articulated concepts and visual motifs. They then create different visual forms to explore how the selected elements could be combined differently. Novices often struggle with these moves, instead focusing on surface features or producing limited visual variation, thus becoming fixated on the reference. Existing tools support editable visual attributes and high-level themes, but provide limited control over how conceptual interpretations relate to expressive visual motifs or how their combinations can be systematically re-expressed. We present ReVision, an AI-based tool that decomposes visual and textual references into editable conceptual interpretations and visual motifs, enables their recombination across conceptual and visual spaces, and renders each direction as divergent visual-form variations, supporting more divergent exploration during the creation process.

Problem

• visual design
• design fixation
• conceptual interpretation
• visual motifs
• divergent exploration

Innovation

• AI-based design tool
• conceptual interpretation
• visual motifs
• divergent exploration
• recombination