I agree, it’s not a fix. However it’s also not just “calling them extremist”. It’s an official classification not just something haphazardly mentioned in a speech.

The move, announced Friday by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), means that the AfD is no longer merely under suspicion. The agency says it now has definitive evidence that the party works against Germany’s democratic system.

A 1,000-page internal report, according to German public broadcaster ARD, underpins the decision, citing violations of core constitutional principles such as human dignity and the rule of law.

The new classification doesn’t ban the party, but it allows German authorities to intensify surveillance, including the use of undercover informants and monitoring communications, under judicial oversight.

Politico

I may have an idea for that. If the choises were made simultaneously and only when a favourable combination was found, submitted, it would allow the user to create different combinations easily until they were happy with one. Similarly to this character creator screeshot here:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PNWK5o9l54w/maxresdefault.jpg

EDIT:

The University of Edinburgh has a publically available visual dataset of 59 forks:

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/UTENSILS/DINNER_FORK/dinner_fork.xml

I guess one way to approach this would be to use something like Skyrim’s character generator. Not sure how challenging it would be to put together something like that but it’d be a laugh.

Your suggestion about a 3d model with adjustable parameters is something I could do in Grasshopper. There is the problem of defining the parameters though. Not impossible by any means but determining which features are the most critical and which could be excluded could end up being surprisingly difficult.

As far as copyright is concerned I don’t think we’d encounter problems when using product photos from Ikea and the like. But your right about the combination part. Not only do the variations need to exist, we’d also need comparable photos of relatively high quality.

If we were to actually do this though, I think it would be best to start simple, do a sort of goldilocks prototype and see how it goes from there. For instance splitting ten (maybe even less) of the most popular forks into three parts and poll people on those (either separately or as combinations). If the number of initial fork designs is not too high, I could even model each of those separately to avoid copyright issues. Then again this works better for determining the preferred shapes and not as well for preferred scale – e.g. how long the tines are compared to the handle etc. I guess there would need to be two stages, shape and proportions. The proportions would be quite simple though and the initial images could just be scaled and skewed to achieve the desired look.

Another idea would be to go through the features one by one, having a poll at each stage. Every time the result is split, we could “fork” the design into multiple ones. This would require a whole lot of orchestration though and I have a gut feeling this wouldn’t work very well in practise. This is also based on the assumptions that there is only one perfect design for each respondent and that the preference for features is not interdependent.

Then again we could utilise gen AI to turn simple proportional sketches / illustrations (modifiable or user drawn) to more realistic images which maybe users could then rate.___

Damn, I already have more ideas.

I have a couple of ideas but I don’t know which would be the easiest.

We could analyse and break down forks to their design features and then let people mix and match. This would take a lot of time though.

Alternatively we could scrape a bunch of fork images and build a large dataset. Then show two at a time to users and let them pick their preferred one repeatedly until we know the preference hieararchy for that user. Then compare users and divide them into demographics.

I guess it would also be possible to have a visual model and some edit options like make different parts longer / thicker. I feel this is unnecessarily complicated.

Another idea would be to break the fork into two or three parts. Not perfect but faster than exploring all design features. Tines, body, end for instance and let people either mix and match or do some for of a/b testing.

My expertise is in design so I can help with those aspects but coding I unfortunately cannot do. Would be a really fun project designwise too…

Anyone interested in developing a “Find your ideal fork” web app?

I for one would be very interested to see statistical preferences…