The promise of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular its latest developments in deep learning, has been influencing all kinds of disciplines such as engineering, business, agriculture, and humanities. More recently it also includes disciplines that were "reserved" to humans such as art and design. While there is a strong debate going on if creativity is profoundly human, we want to investigate if creativity can be supported or fostered by AI-not replaced. This paper investigates if AI is capable of (a) inspiring designers by suggesting unexpected design variations, (b) learning the designer's taste or (c) being a co-creation partner. To do so we adopted AI algorithms, which can be trained by a small sample set of shapes of a given object, to propose novel shapes. The evaluation of our proposed methods revealed that it can be used by trained designers as well as non-designers to support the design process in different phases and that it could lead to novel designs not intended/foreseen by designers.
