Preference Without Assertion: Locating Aesthetic Agency in a Gaze-Driven Design System

This paper reports what happened to creative agency inside a system we built to read it. EUPHORIA--RETINA captures a designer's aesthetic preference from gaze inside an immersive virtual moodspace and hands that signal to an agentic pipeline that generates product form. By its own metrics the system succeeds: it is more than four times faster than manual practice, and fifty independent experts, blind to how each artefact was made, ranked its outputs highest on every problem. This paper is about what that success displaced. Across three studies ($n{=}30$; $n{=}30$; a Latin-square comparison of four workflows judged by 50 experts) we find that a single priming sentence delivered before a session severs the link between gaze duration and preference ($r = {+}0.38 \rightarrow {-}0.09$) while cutting disagreement between observers by 64\%---and that the gaze signal itself is unchanged, so the system cannot tell which regime it is operating in. Through a stage-level authorship ledger we further show that delegating perception to the machine bought almost nothing (${+}0.6$ points of measured design quality) while delegating generation bought almost everything (${+}26.6$). We conclude that in creative systems that read the body rather than ask the person, aesthetic agency migrates to whoever writes the sentence before the session begins.