We are a migrant species, instilled with a wanderlust that continually clamors for new horizons. Before the modern era of mobility, landscape paintings were often the primary means by which people could visualize faraway lands and mentally escape to them.<\/p>\n
Today, eight-year-olds trade \u201cseeds\u201d for favored Minecraft worlds, and procedurally generated environments have become commonplace in video games, where the algorithmic production of novel landscapes is an economic necessity for inexhaustible play. For the meta-designer and artist-programmer, there is assuredly something godlike about calling forth world upon world. It is probably not a coincidence that the first all-CGI sequence in a feature film depicted the synthesis of an entire planet, in the triumphant \u201cGenesis Sequence\u201d of Star Trek II (1982).<\/p>\n
Generative design systems, whether used to create faces, landscapes, creatures, or chairs, define seemingly infinite possibility spaces. Pay heed, however, to what Kate Compton calls the \u201c10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal Problem\u201d: \u201cI can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot of oatmeal.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Compton indicates, the challenge and opportunity of meta-design is in architecting systems whose results offer perceptual uniqueness, and are thus meaningfully distinct.<\/p>\n