A Consideration on Initial Parameter Setting using Onomatopoeias for Interactive Design Tools

Onomatopoeias are useful expression to communicate intuitive image of some designs. There are some approaches adopt onomatopoeias to design computer graphics, robot motion or Japanese calligraphic fonts. Murata et al. [11] introduced onomatopoeias to their system to design Japanese calligraphic fonts, however, it wasn’t easy task to achieve suitable design using only onomatopoeias. On the other hand, Nakamura et al. [12] suggested that achieving an optimal design on an interactive design system corresponds to solving a search problem. To solve the search problem, selection of initial values plays an important role. Nakamura et al. proposed introducing onomatopoeias to set proper initial values of Murata’s design system. Nakamura’s experimental result showed that the proposed method is useful to achieve an suitable design of the calligraphic font. But the experiment was conducted for the fonts whose appearances were easily described by using onomatopoeias. Our study aims to reevaluate Nakamura’s method. We adopted the fonts whose appearances were difficult to describe by onomatopoeias, and conducted an experiment to evaluate the cost to achieve the suitable design. As the experimental result, onomatopoeias can be a useful tool to achieve an suitable design without considering easiness or difficulty to describe by onomatopoeias.