AI-driven workshop

The intention of the workshop is that of full sensory engagement in the ideation process using both analogue and digital tools. With the rapid advancement of generative AI, however, and its impact on design, both in the profession and academia, this may suggest a fully AI-driven workshop. Already AI algorithms have proved to be a useful and efficient assistant augmenting, or streamlining the design process, notably in visualising ideas producing images to a quality that compares with the best in photography or rendering, and in a matter of seconds. And so, the workshop's focus would be ideation through text-to-image prompting techniques. Such focusing would be in line with the long-term development of designers' relationships with technology, that is, both with and through machines, as manifested by the personal computer, the internet and virtual reality. Indeed designers are at once driver of, and driven by technology. Yet would designers like to be so dependent on AI models that the human dimension of design would take a backseat? And so, what happens to intellectual and emotional challenges of the design brief, to personal satisfaction of problem-solving and innovation, or to the playfulness of human imagination? In short, what is it to be a human designer in the age of AI? But, and here lies a paradox: generative AI stimulates and augments imagination blurring the boundaries between reality and representation, between the real and the artificial. In other words, an AI idea generator can be seen as a form of hyperreality and simulacrum (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981), or representations without real-world originals.