An evaluation study of <i>AiLoupe</i> : An AI driven design tool to source and select textile materials
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Designers typically source materials physically in expos, collections, and shops, relying on their touch and tacit knowledge. Whilst effective, this process faces challenges such as time constraints, inefficiency, and limited transparency. Amidst a rise in new digital tools to aid in textile material selection, there is a gap in evaluation studies of how these tools contribute towards the designer’s Material Sourcing Journey (MSJ), particularly taking into account the sensory experience of materials. This paper presents a study involving 22 textile, fashion and product designers to evaluate AiLoupe, a mobile app which uses image recognition and a purpose-built Sensory Materials Library to aid designers to identify, select, and source materials in the studio and at fabric expos. Results highlight AiLoupe’s potential to streamline workflows, support sustainability, and improve collaboration through its structured Material Data Cards (MDCs). Insights emphasize designers’ need for comparison tools, clearer performance scales, and enhanced accuracy of physical material identification.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it