Exploring the opportunities and challenges of european design policy to enable innovation. The case of designscapes project

Design policy for innovation and prosperity has been acknowledged and adopted globally. Existing literature on design policy usually adopts a top-down perspective to analyse the components of the design innovation system and ignores the practical needs of practitioners. Our study aims to explore potential opportunities and challenges of design policies for design-enabled innovation from a bottom-up perspective. We firstly discussed the enabling role of design in the context of design as input, output and process of innovation with emphasis on design-enabled innovation conception

Combining Markov Random Fields and Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Synthesis

This paper studies a combination of generative Markov random field (MRF) models and discriminatively trained deep convolutional neural networks (dCNNs) for synthesizing 2D images. The generative MRF acts on higher-levels of a dCNN feature pyramid, controling the image layout at an abstract level. We apply the method to both photographic and non-photo-realistic (artwork) synthesis tasks. The MRF regularizer prevents over-excitation artifacts and reduces implausible feature mixtures common to previous dCNN inversion approaches, permitting synthezing photographic content with increased visual plausibility. Unlike standard MRF-based texture synthesis, the combined system can both match and adap…

Food Frontiers : An academically sponsored new journal

The role of collaboration in innovation at cultural and creative organisations. The case of the museum

Museums are art and cultural organisations that can be powerful levers for local development from a socio-economic viewpoint. Innovation is a key to enabling them to accomplish this task. Emphasis ...

Assessing the role of collaboration in the process of museum innovation

The relationship between collaboration and innovation in cultural organisations is an emerging topic that has drawn particular attention from scholars and practitioners. The main aim of this study is to assess the role of collaboration in the process of innovation in museum organisations. To achieve this aim, first, we develop a four-domain analytical framework by matching innovation types to cultural production processes to reflect the peculiarities of museum innovation. By applying this framework to the multiple case studies from four Spanish museums, we identify three main motivations (supplementing manpower, compensating for the scarcity of knowledge, improving demand-driven innovation)…

Cities as Enablers of Innovation

The relationship between cities and innovation in present times can be regarded from a distinctive perspective. As it is vital to rethink our development patterns, in order to contrast global warming and its ominous threats, cities are themselves concrete materials for innovation. Therefore, cities challenge the very same concept of innovation by adding the long-term perspective to its social assessment framework. Cities are therefore seen both as hotbeds of creativity and innovative culture and places where different actors (policy makers, civil servants, NGOs, citizens, start-uppers, entrepreneurs, etc.) receive continuous stimuli to engage in innovations that fulfil specific needs (be th…

A triplet under focus:Innovation, design and the city

Three key concept domains are considered and explored in a unitary framework. They are: innovation, the only possible response to global crises, aiming at transforming behaviours and practices towards systemic changes and transition; design, a way of creatively conceiving, developing and driving forward new practices for undertaking large scale transitions; and cities, seen as the environments where problems present themselves in the most socially relevant way and at the same time as key opportunities for testing and adopting forms of innovation which target global challenges. The chapter positions the three key concepts in relation to the most relevant academic references and to the curren…

Benchmarking non-photorealistic rendering of portraits

We present a set of images for helping NPR practitioners evaluate their image-based portrait stylisation algorithms. Using a standard set both facilitates comparisons with other methods and helps ensure that presented results are representative. We give two levels of difficulty, each consisting of 20 images selected systematically so as to provide good coverage of several possible portrait characteristics. We applied three existing portrait-specific stylisation algorithms, two general-purpose stylisation algorithms, and one general learning based stylisation algorithm to the first level of the benchmark, corresponding to the type of constrained images that have often been used in portrait-s…

An insight into museum innovation. Theoretical development and empirical study in the case of museums from Valencia Region of Spain

En los útimos años, tanto desde el mundo académico como entre los responsables polı́ticos, se ha puesto énfasis en la transformación del modelo competitivo, para el desarrollo nacional o regional, a partir de la innovación basada en los sectores culturales y creativos. En este sentido, los museos, como instituciones contenedoras de patrimonio, pueden convertirse en un importante vehı́culo de transmisión de la innovación que apoye la inclusión social y el desarrollo regional, tanto en España como en las distintas regiones mediterráneas, ahora que se enfrentan a los desafı́os provocados por la reciente crisis. Sin embargo, el estudio y la comprensión de los procesos de innvoación…

Approximate 3D Partial Symmetry Detection Using Co-occurrence Analysis

This paper addresses approximate partial symmetry detection in 3D point clouds, a classical and foundational tool for analyzing geometry. We present a novel, fully unsupervised method that detects partial symmetry under significant geometric variability, and without constraints on the number and arrangement of instances. The core idea is a matching scheme that finds consistent co-occurrence patterns in a frame-invariant way. We obtain a canonical partition of the input shape into building blocks and can handle ambiguous data by aggregating co-occurrence information across both all building block instances and the area they cover. We evaluate our method on several benchmark data sets and dem…

Precomputed Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks

This paper proposes Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks (MGANs), a method for training generative networks for efficient texture synthesis. While deep neural network approaches have recently demonstrated remarkable results in terms of synthesis quality, they still come at considerable computational costs (minutes of run-time for low-res images). Our paper addresses this efficiency issue. Instead of a numerical deconvolution in previous work, we precompute a feed-forward, strided convolutional network that captures the feature statistics of Markovian patches and is able to directly generate outputs of arbitrary dimensions. Such network can directly decode brown noise to realistic textu…