When different members of a community interact, they manage to find different solutions for any situation that are different, in general, to those that single individuals or non-interacting ones can provide. This is one key feature of collective behavior, a strongly interdisciplinar field studied in biology, physics or social sciences. Recent studies in this field, reveal that the diversity among the individuals of a community, coming from different factors, can make the community more flexible under unexpected situations creating a stronger ecosystem.

Within the INEDIT Project  the use of Generative Modelling for furniture design paves the way to an Artificial Creativity tool that enhances the skills of users as designers, and consequently the amount of data that can be collected from them within such co-creation platform. AIMEN explores the role of stochasticity in users behavior for design problems solved by this Artificial Intelligence-based approach.  The codification of each design into a point representing a member of a community, will provide a source of information about the fluctuations of the artificial or real designers around potential optimal points. This way designs will act as birds in a flock or bees in a swarm. And their own fluctuations or those of their neighbors, will define optimal search or preference spaces for designs.

This novel approach within the INEDIT project, represents a step towards the use of collective intelligence in product design. Quantifying the role of diversity of an ecosystem in co-creation processes and its impact in a Social Manufacturing framework.