Metamorphosis — joeyhou.design

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Generative Branding & Interactive Systems

Metamorphosis

Graudate Thesis | Generative Platform | AI Driven | AR/VR | 3D Print

Metamorphosis is an AI-powered collaborative design system that reimagines design as a living, evolving organism—shaped not by fixed outcomes, but by continuous transformation.

The project unfolds across multiple mediums: a web-based platform, physical installations, and 3D-printed artifacts. Using the egg as both generative metaphor and functional interface, each module participates in a shared ecology of emergence, rupture, and renewal. Rather than presenting a single narrative, this work investigates a fundamental shift: what happens when design becomes a conversation rather than a command? When designers facilitate conditions for emergence rather than control every outcome?

The project offers an open framework—one that embraces unpredictability, invites collective authorship, and resists finality.

Potential Applications

Designers & Brands

A platform for generating dynamic brand identity systems where each iteration is unique yet coherent—moving beyond static brand guidelines toward living, responsive visual languages. Particularly relevant for campaigns that value participatory creativity and want audiences to feel like co-creators, not just consumers.

Education & Workshops

A collaborative tool where students explore the relationship between human intention and machine interpretation. By co-creating 3D models in real-time, participants learn systems thinking, AI literacy, and how meaning emerges from collective interaction rather than individual control.

Research &
Art Practice

An experimental platform for investigating questions of authorship, AI agency, and non-deterministic creative systems. Useful for practitioners exploring the boundaries between human creativity and computational generation, or examining how collaboration with machines transforms artistic practice.

Therapeutic & Expressive Use

A space for collective emotional expression where abstract feelings and shared experiences transform into tangible 3D forms, offering new ways to visualize and communicate inner states that resist conventional language.

Concept

The visual identity uses soft radial gradients and fluid typography to embody the project's philosophy: nothing is static, everything evolves. The gradient represents how ideas diffuse through collective interaction; the morphing typography reflects the destabilization of fixed identities. "Metamorphosis" operates as both title and process， describing what the project does, not just what it's about.

Evolution Chain

These stages loop back on each other—digital informs physical, physical seeds new digital—creating a continuous cycle. This mirrors the thesis's argument: design as ongoing transformation rather than fixed conclusion.

Design As a Life (The Interactive Platform)

A real-time collaborative web platform built with React and Firebase that demonstrates how design can function as a participatory ecosystem rather than a top-down process. The platform consists of four key moments, each designed to shift users from passive observation to active co-creation.

(explore the experience here)

Homepage

A large white egg slowly breathes at the center, symbolizing dormant potential and inviting interaction. When you click "Create," you enter the egg, crossing from passive observation to active participation. This threshold moment embodies the thesis's emphasis on incubation: transformation requires entering a shared space where you let go of complete control.

Canvas & Collabration

Inside, you encounter a shared canvas where multiple users draw simultaneously. Built with Firebase for real-time synchronization, the platform supports concurrent collaboration without lag. This isn't just multi-user drawing—it's decentralized authorship where no single person controls the outcome. The canvas is the literal space where the thesis's philosophy (design as ecology, not hierarchy) becomes a tangible interaction.

Incubation & Generation System

When ready, users trigger incubation, initiating a two-step AI transformation:

Step 1 (Gemini 2.5): The canvas is analyzed and transformed into narrative text. Example: "Chaotic marks → a creature born from fire and ice"

Step 2 (Tripo AI): That narrative becomes a 3D model.

The narrative layer introduces intentional slippage—the gap between what you drew and what AI understood. This gap is where surprise happens, where the collaboration between human and machine becomes visible.

Variability & Emergent Forms

The incubation process is deliberately non-deterministic. Same drawing → different creatures. Different drawings → similar results. This isn't a bug—it's the philosophy made tangible.

Traditional software optimizes for consistency (same input = same output). This platform optimizes for emergence: the AI interprets rather than executes. Design outcomes aren't inevitable—they're one possibility among many. The designer's role shifts from "author of outcomes" to "facilitator of conditions."

Design As a Place
(Physical Translation)

If "Life" explores digital collaboration, "Place" investigates transformation through physical matter. This module translates microscopic egg surface textures into speculative geological landscapes, demonstrating that the project's logic of emergence works across any medium—digital or physical.

Egg Terrain Generator

This module translates microscopic egg surface textures into digital terrains. Eggs photographed under high magnification reveal intricate patterns: scratches, pores, and density variations. These are fed into geological algorithms that treat texture as a tectonic force: dense areas become peaks, porous areas become valleys. Biological surface becomes speculative geography, demonstrating emergence across scales.

Microstructural Mapping

Egg surfaces are photographed, segmented, and color-coded to generate texture maps, transforming biological material into interpretable data. This reveals that translation is never neutral; every choice shapes what the eventual landscape becomes.

3D Geological Uplift Simulation

Texture maps are fed into geological algorithms simulating millions of years in seconds. Dense areas rise to form peaks; porous areas sink to valleys. The process collapses biological time into geological time, treating design artifacts as possessing multiple temporalities.

Design As Time(Freezing Transformation)

If "Life" explores digital evolution and "Place" investigates computational landscape, then "Time" examines material memory—how transformation can be captured and frozen into lasting physical form through 3D printing. Digital outputs become tangible artifacts, but these aren't final sculptures—they're snapshots of ongoing transformation.

Temporal Layering & Geomorphological Transformation

The egg transforms through progressive layering: biological object → texture data → computational terrain → physical sculpture.

Each stage adds temporal dimensions—biological, human, computational, geological—that layer rather than replace each other. Artifacts exist simultaneously in multiple timescales, each carrying traces of what came before.

Fossilized Records

These 3D-printed forms function as fossils, preserving traces of user interaction, AI interpretation, and computational generation. They resemble geological remains, emphasizing emergence over control. Unlike traditional "final" objects, they're understood as one frame in an infinite sequence—anchoring creation while demonstrating nothing is truly final.

Documentation(Digest and Thesis Book)

Digest

The digest functions as a working document for thinking through early ideas. Using collage aesthetics, it established core elements: egg imagery, gradient language, biological metaphors, and philosophical integration. Both archive and generator.

Thesis Book

The thesis book embodies the project's philosophy in its physical form. Color shifts mark transitions; gradient-coded page edges create a spectrum when closed; fluid typography echoes the platform's morphing language. The book deliberately blurs archive and living organism, meant to feel still evolving despite being printed. By designing documentation as an embodiment rather than a report, it becomes part of meaning-making, not just description.

Make It Real!( From Thesis to Experience)

Collaborative Simulation

During development, I invited cohort members to co-create through screen-sharing. The goal: observe what happens when multiple people with different intentions work simultaneously. What emerged: spontaneous negotiation, implicit coordination, patterns no single person planned. AR/VR integration let participants walk around generated creatures, experiencing the full cycle from 2D marks to immersive space. A playful inquiry into fundamental questions: Who authors when many contribute? Where does individual intention end?

Final Collective Hatch

For the thesis defense, I designed the presentation as a live demonstration. RI invited everyone to actually collaborate in real-time. As I presented, participants drew on laptops, the canvas filled with overlapping intentions. Then I triggered incubation: the collective drawing hatched into 3D creatures on screen. The result was unpredictable, chaotic, deeply human. This enacted the thesis's core argument: design as facilitation rather than authorship. The ending refused to end—every conclusion is just another beginning.

Core Research Question

What happens when design shifts from controlling outcomes to facilitating emergence?
This thesis investigates evolving dynamics of authorship and co-creation in contemporary design. Historically, design was hierarchical—designers controlled meaning while users remained passive. But digital platforms and AI have shifted this: real-time collaboration and collective contribution blur designer/user distinctions, enabling more participatory paradigms.

Theoretical Foundation:
Drawing on Heidegger (meaning emerges from lived experience) and Deleuze (entities continuously shaped through relationships), the research reframes design as fundamentally dynamic and interaction-driven. The designer's role shifts from creator of outcomes to facilitator of conditions.

Methodology:
The research evolved through three phases:

Print-based exploration revealed static limitations;
Digital platform development (React + Firebase + Gemini 2.5 + Tripo AI) operationalized theoretical constructs;
Physical materialization (3D printing + AR/VR) grounded theory in material reality.

Core Arguments:

Design as system rather than object
Emergence as design principle (variability creates space for discovery)
Collaboration with uncertainty (AI interprets rather than executes)
Multiple temporalities (artifacts contain overlapping timescales)

Implications:
This offers design as an ongoing participatory dialogue rather than a static artifact. For practitioners: new approaches to AI integration. For educators: frameworks for systems thinking. For researchers: methods for investigating human-AI collaboration.

Future Directions:Deeper physical-digital integration, orchestrating multiple AI models, studying group coordination in emergent systems, developing evaluation frameworks for non-deterministic design.

The fundamental proposition:
Every ending is another beginning. Every hatching reveals not a final form, but conditions for further transformation.

(view full thesis summary)

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