A study of the use of AI in design reveals a tendency to isolate specific tasks within the design process and then try to find a role for AI to support or substitute those tasks - for example as a moodboard-maker, PowerPoint slide suggester, or t-shirt generator. But to come to true creative collaboration with AI as a designer and a creative maker, AI could then become a companion that not only merely offers a solution or the ‘right answer’, but challenges and proposes an alternative surprising view on a design situation.
As part of this project, we analysed what an object detection model detects when looking at creative content like images of paintings and design. As the model is placed outside of its context, the AI ‘mislabels’ parts of the images. This mislabelling, however, can be seen as providing an alternative view of the design output, which in turn could activate reflections and directions for the following process. In a first explorative experiment, a designer tried to ‘recreate’ what an AI could have seen in an image by adjusting an artefact (in this case a chair) according to the labels given by AI. The goal is to see if, after interpreting the AI ‘image’, the designer is stimulated to perceive a new space of possibilities.
The project investigates how a designer can interact creatively with an AI-system, and how an AI-system could be trained and used to take part in a creative process. What new practices for a designer could emerge with AI input?
