Accelerating evolution by direct manipulation for interactive fashion design

In usual evolutionary computation (EC) is not effective for local search, but efficient for global search due to its probabilistic operators. This problem becomes worse in the interactive EC (IEC) applications, which have the generation length limitation caused by user evaluation. To solve that, this paper proposes direct manipulation (DM) method, well known in HCI field, of evolution for IEC. It allows the user to manipulate individuals directly, instead of using evolutionary operators as an interface to each individual. Through this approach, the DM overcomes the shortcoming of EC, letting alone the ability of global search to the original operators. We have applied the DM concept to the fashion design system based on IEC, and shown that the application is promising with two experiments.