PUBLIC MARKS with tags face & useful

This sketch presents a novel method for digital face beautification: given a frontal photograph of a face (a portrait), our method automatically increases the predicted attractiveness rating of the face. The main challenge is to achieve this goal while introducing only minute, subtle modifications to the original image, such that the resulting “beautified” face maintains a strong, unmistakable similarity to the original, as demonstrated by the pair of faces shown in Figure 1. The effectiveness of the proposed method was experimentally validated by a group of test subjects who consistently rated the modified faces as more attractive than the original ones. Professional photographers have been retouching and deblemishing their subjects ever since the invention of photography. It may be safely assumed that any model that we encounter on a magazine cover today has been digitally manipulated by a skilled, talented retouching artist. Since the human face is arguably the most frequently photographed object on earth, a tool such as ours would be a useful and welcome addition to the ever-growing arsenal of image enhancement and retouching tools available in today’s digital image editing packages. The potential of such a tool for motion picture special effects and advertising is also quite obvious.

Introduction We are facing a planet that is slowly disintegrating by pollution and global warming. We live in a society that is sadly corrupted by violence and inequality. And in which poverty goes hand in hand with over consumption. Our world certainly is a dysfunctional world. This exhibition focuses on a group of young designers who operate both as producers and social engineers. In their desire for an instantly engaged attitude, they reinterpret their own environment to offer useful and ingenious suggestions for design that can be at once critical, functional and witty. Using prosaic materials, found or recycled objects, and by reassembling and reconstructing old and new, they address environmental problems, gender issues, and politics of space, or simply press for a more human face of design. Not without humour they trigger awareness of our patterns of behaviour. And by exploring the symbolic values of the objects that surround us, they remind us that while we all share the dream of living in a better world we are equally responsible for creating or at least sustaining it. The participants in the exhibition are students or recent graduates of Konstfack from different departments, including Interior Design and architecture, Industrial Design, Glass and Ceramics and Textiles. Renée Padt, Curator