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.