Trinketry helps designers track ideas with reusable design elements
Trinketry: Materializing Elements to Anchor Traceable Design Histories
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Designers often try many ideas quickly using generative tools but can lose track of the good ones and how they came about. The authors created trinkets—small saved parts of a design that can be reused, searched, and used to navigate through the history of a project. Their tool, Trinketry, lets designers see and focus on parts of their evolving work instead of just whole images. Studies showed Trinketry helped designers feel more control, reconstruct their past design steps better, and continue exploring ideas. However, the authors note more work is needed to include explicit reasons behind design choices.
What this means in practice
- •For concept designers: Manage and revisit specific design parts to better understand and expand creative projects using reusable saved elements.
- •For graphic design teams: Maintain clearer records of evolving design ideas and decisions to support collaborative continuity and handoff between team members.
Authors
Wen-Fan Wang, Yi-Ting Chiu, You-Yi Hsieh, Bing-Yu Chen, Max Kreminski
Abstract
Generative tools enable visual designers to rapidly explore diverse design directions---but as flawed generated outputs proliferate, designers may lose track of promising ideas and the context of their development. We introduce trinkets: user-preserved design elements that function as reusable materials, retrieval queries, and navigational anchors for tracing how ideas emerge, transform, and recur throughout design history. We implement this concept in Trinketry, a visual exploration canvas. In a within-subjects study with 12 concept designers, Trinketry supported focused element-level exploration and greater perceived control than a simple branching image generation history baseline. A follow-up study with six returning designers examined delayed design history sensemaking, continuation of work, and reconstruction of others' processes. Compared with whole-image histories, Trinketry supported more precise reconstruction of process structure, turning points, and goals, while helping designers recover overlooked materials and continue exploration. However, opportunities remain to augment trace representations with explicit statements of design rationale.