AI as ideation partner

Design ideation may conjure up the Aha! moment, the sketch on the back of an envelope or the lone creative genius. Everyday ideation in creative industries, however, suggests that successful ideas are the result of many minds and hands working collaboratively. Indeed Mark Twain, the American author, in emphasising the combinatorial nature of creativity, held that substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources. But drawing on very large outside sources, and across domains is what generative AI does well. And so, while designers will never stop coming up with great ideas, AI can augment that creativity. That is, when designers only have vague initial ideas, generative AI can help to crystalise ithem. In fact, using generative AI such as ChatGPT designers no longer have to "waste" their time coming up with already existing ideas. Instead they can apply their creative energy towards iterating, assembling, and combining to create new ideas that they would not have been able to do without the help of AI. However, generative AI might tempt designers to start the design process through prompt engineering (describing a task that an AI should perform) rather than, say, idea sketching using pen and paper. That is, generative AI, as an ideation tool, may sideline or bypass traditional ways of getting the design process started. But if going straight to AI, what impact will AI have on reflective design principles while designing? Or, as held by Umberto Eco, the philosopher and writer, 'Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think'.

Workshop in the age of AI

The impact of artificial intelligence, AI on the design process is accelerating, from the early days of CAD streamlining a wide array of mundane steps associated with manual design (drafting) to becoming a tool and medium for complex design expressions (ideation). Ultimately, the merging of CAD and prompt-engineered Large learning models, LLMs, would take care of the design process end-to-end, or result in fully integrated Building information models, BIMs, from first idea to final materialisation. But if AI someday becomes able to perform actions currently carried out by designers and engineers it also raises concerns related to employment in the field. Indeed, AI is prompting questions on the future of work and human creativity. In one recent example of generative AI’s achievements, as reported in Scientific American, AI programs (GPT-4) outscored the average human in tasks requiring originality, as judged by human reviewers. But while it is natural and historical that humans are apprehensive of new technology, the cognitive associations of generative AI and humans differ. That is, human sensemaking is generated through personal interests, memories, feelings and lived experiences whereas AI is rather imitating or simulating what people can do. Moreover, the ethical, cultural and societal values and judgements underlying and supporting design proposals need to be made transparent for which humans, not machines should be accountable. Overall, then, this suggests that the ideation workshop, in encouraging the participants to trying out a wide range of conceptual tools, both analogue and digital, in order to better engage with, and therefore better understand design thinking and making, remains relevant and meanigful in the age of AI. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-anxiety-is-on-the-rise-heres-how-to-manage-it/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb

Adhocism

The ideation workshop resonates with the notion of adhocism dealing with an existing situation through trial-and-error, adjustment and readjustment to address a problem quickly and efficiently. It is an approach to creative design that relies on our ability to everyday improvisation particularly in using resources already at hand. A purpose immediately fulfilled is the ideal of adhocism; it cuts through the usual delays caused by planning, bureaucracy and hierarchical organisation. Indeed the man-made environment is built up of fragments from the past and most creations, and therefore ideas are initially ad hoc combinations of past elements or subsystems. Moreover, adhocism is satisfyingly familiar in that it is what people do all the time in dealing with the unexpected - tacit kinds of knowing but unexamined or unexpressed, a basis of most human behavior, as in 'you work with what you have'. What signifies successful adhocism is creative activity that shows in the novel adjustment to the situation, the clever new use of resources (including skills). Good adhocers, then, deal well with uncertainty. They experiment, try something new, take a small step to discover what works. They show skills in adapting the available resources to the situation, or in adapting themselves to the circumstances. Source: Jenkins, C and Silver, N (1972) Adhocism: The Case for Impovisation. MA: MIT Press.

Idea prompting

Ideas seem to appear anytime and everywhere, slowly emerging or popping up seemingly from nowhere. From a blank piece of paper to the proverbial "Aha!" moment. But what human ingenuity is needed to generate ideas in the age of artifical intelligence, AI? When prompt engineering for a text-to-text model, or a text-to-image model can help produce the desired idea (output). Idea prompting, then, is becoming increasingly a useful ideation tool for designers because large language models, LLMs, have the ability to understand prompts, also called "in-context learning". Prompting skills, which involves specifying or adjusting the AI prompt, moreover, help designers better understand the capabilities and limitations of LLMs. That is, knowing how to write concise, clear prompts will ensure that any AI prompt will produce a strong response.The iterative process of prompting, then, enables designers to generate, revise and refine ideas producing in-depth creative content.

AI-powered ideation tools

Browser-based idea and sketch generators, or AI-powered ideation tools are increasingly getting apt at producing imaginative and useful creative output. For example, from a few rough sketch lines, AI technology can quickly analyse the simple sketch drawing and algorithmically generate unlimited sketch ideas and images. Similarly, AI can transform a photo into sketch, or even create sketch drawing form text descriptions (prompts). Indeed, OpenAI's DALL-E 2 text-to-art platform allows users to generated images just about anything, and both realistic and creative images. AI, then, has become a powerful ideation tool at the very beginning of the design process, and very fast at that.

Thumbnail sketching

Thumbnail sketching is part of the designer repertoire and refers to a series of small drawings used to quickly explore a variety of design ideas which can be worked out either in physical or electronic format. In the digital realm, and particularly on social media platforms, a thumbnail sketch is about a small, clickable image representing a larger piece of content. This can be a video (as seen on YouTube), an article, a webpage, or a product. Thumbnails are the first thing users see when they encounter online content. And so a well-designed, appealing thumbnail can attract viewer attention, give a preview of the content, and significantly improve the engagement rate directly impacting the click-through rate of the content. Moreover, YouTube’s post-pandemic boom has helped create a microeconomy for thumbnail designers. Indeed for YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a video's reach. But designers are seeing the rise of text-to-image tools such as Midjourney and AlphaCTR with a mix of anxiety and curiosity. Curiosity because these tools can produce thumbnails within minutes, rather than hours, as with conventional software, and anxiety because these tools feed on other people’s work raising concerns about copyright infringement. Yet, in technical terms, what thumbnail designers are doing when using text-to-image generation AI tools is simply to incorporate AI into their workflow to create customised visuals. To compete with AI generated thumbnails, human thumbnail designers have to be very good, particularly as thumbnail sketching has wide application in the creative industries, a field where generative AI is evolving fast. Source: https://restofworld.org/2023/youtube-thumbnail-ai/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

Working it out

Recognised chiefly for his modern designs of steel and glass, and for smooth exterior contours and open, naturally-lit interiors, Norman Foster (b. 1935), a British architect, says, 'travel and the lessons from studying buildings and cities are as important to me now as they were when I was at architecture school. In that sense I am still a student.' And so, among his mentors are Buckminster Fuller, Paul Rudolph, Serge Chermayeff and Vincent Scully as well as the Bauhaus and Ulm schools of design. A motivating force in Foster's design practice is his eagerness to know and to learn: 'I was always curious about how something works, in the case of the windmill the inner workings, the cogs, how the wind power was transmitted eventually to the stones that would grind the grain. I think that that comes round to how do you find a basis for design. It’s not just how the materials work but – whether it’s a museum or a corporate entity – what are the values, what makes it tick below the surface. How can that be reflected in the architecture? How can the architecture enable it to work better?' He continues: 'And to give insights into the creative processes beneath the surface – to show that something that looks very simple has come out of studying many options.' While there is accumulated extensive knowledge of famous architects' advice for young designers, Foster's insightful and thoughful words are bound to be both inspirational and useful to a wide range of creatives. Source: Interview in The Guardian July 9, 2023.