Merging data science with art and design: Part 1
By: Allison Bishop
Tags: Design Process, App Development, Art Consulting, Textile Design, Data Science

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Hi! My name is Allison and I’m a data scientist with a background as a CPA. I’m based in Atlanta, Georgia.

This being the week after my graduation from my immersive data science bootcamp at General Assembly, I want to keep up the momentum and document some ideas.

I started off with a couple off-the-cuff project proposals around two of my passions, art and design. They are rooted in data science methods and shaped by domain knowledge. I intend to actively work on them first as open-source apps that I develop through a collaborative pipeline, with other aficionados and subject matter experts.

Later in the blogging timeline, I’ll be getting into the weeds of areas like business process management, business strategy, art production through deep learning models, etc.

First I’m keeping it light with some fun ideas that could ultimately help us enjoy our domestic surroundings, aka, our visual home life.

Art consulting app

Match art collectors with visual artists. Build off of existing artwork libraries and open source software to create an artist / artwork recommender system for collectors.The points of differentiation would include the following added context layers:

Interior design scheme in the collectors’ homes : How the art pieces could coordinate with the existing scheme or inform the interior design process

: How the art pieces could coordinate with the existing scheme or inform the interior design process Artist career status : Use weightings scale for emerging artists and established artists with an oeuvre (body of work) size consistent with mid-career as well as late-career artists. In the case that a collector wants to focus on supporting emerging artists, the weighting would favor them in the algorithm.

: Use weightings scale for emerging artists and established artists with an oeuvre (body of work) size consistent with mid-career as well as late-career artists. In the case that a collector wants to focus on supporting emerging artists, the weighting would favor them in the algorithm. Collecting principles: Do the collectors’ collecting strategy focus on art as an investment class and secondary market sellability (at auction houses, for example), or the pure love of art, or a mix? Do they favor a single genre or a multi-genre grab-bag that then needs to be shaped into a cohesive whole?

Textile design app

Build a textile design pipeline with a generative adversarial network.

Surface pattern design : Create surface pattern designs that can be easily printed on a standard textile structure, such as a simple woven fabric. These would mostly play on color and two-dimensional visual composition.

: Create surface pattern designs that can be easily printed on a standard textile structure, such as a simple woven fabric. These would mostly play on color and two-dimensional visual composition. Textile structure design: Create much more involved textile structure designs. Textile structures include woven, knitted, nonwoven, crocheted, 3-D printed, etc. These would be bounded by the physical/ technical limitations of the machines that make them (handmade is not what I have in mind here) — these would bound the hyperparameters set. These would have a wider playing field as far as the design elements that can come out of it. It’s a wider field because for one, there’s a whole set of different color qualities that spring out of types of fibers (cotton, wool, silk, rayon, flax, linen, cashmere, etc.). Also there’s the interplay of color, fiber qualities (shiny, matte, color-changing with movement, holographic-effect, etc.) and fabric construction (velvet, different-density knits that are loose in some parts and packed together in others, seersucker, embroidered mesh, etc.) This would be super involved but I’m super motivated to work on it.

A teaser for the next post

Ideas around a real estate app for the Atlanta-area luxury real estate market is coming up on the next blog!