AI as Design Material

AI has become a buzzword in the technology-driven age that we live in, with all startups claiming for AI-driven innovation in their offerings, and others championing its need in the field of health, education, automobiles alike. As AI becomes more and more embedded in our world, it becomes even more integral to unpack what AI means and more importantly as this week’s brief suggests — to specifically understand what AI means as a material for design.

Coming from a print design background, I have been privy to senior designers complain of young graphic designers who would design for print, without any knowledge of printing processes. Their view speaks of the need to understand materials — paper types, size, inks, and printing techniques, as much as the need to learn the tools. Understanding these materials is to know what they afford and what they can produce. A similar mistake is being made in designers trying to adapt to AI as a tool, without first understanding it as a material at its core. AI today is being readily adapted to all kinds of products, without necessarily reflecting a core need and just becoming another mean. In light of its prevalence and mass adoption, to understand artificial intelligence as a design material is key to understand what it can afford and in the same vein to question what it can’t and should not.

The Llach reading pushes this idea of materiality a step further, highlighting these software systems as “modulating the material production of our built environments — becoming a cultural and technical infrastructure, in ways too important to ignore.” He speaks of a critical way of understanding intelligent systems, distinct from and opposed to autonomous entities or obedient tools. These systems in his opinion move beyond just being instruments of design, but rather become infrastructure capable of reconfiguring ideas of design, work, authorship and what it means to be human. This infrastructure view paves way for something much bigger by “endowing digital technologies for design with social, material and spatial dimensions.”

When you view technology in its social, material and spacial capacities, it not only builds on a more cohesive vocabulary to conceptualizing design, it also plays on the crucial domain of analysis and critique, and the need for designers to discuss its ethical considerations. As Molly Steenson brings to light in her book through the experiments and sometimes (miss)experiments of MIT Architecture Group, “what are the implications of these demos and simulations when we scale them up?” What happens when we move beyond these controlled microworlds created for experimentation? What does one abstract and make concrete in the making of these intelligent systems? And, who becomes accountable for these?

Llach also probes way into considering the constraints of accountability which follows stringent views of viewing technology as either autonomous or neutral, in a way that hides a great deal. Where one view (autonomous)relies too much on the agency of the technology, shielding its makers and consequences from scrutiny and the other (neutral) deprives both technology and humans of their agency as participants and again shields them from critical scrutiny. Daniel Cardoso Llach beautifully and succinctly puts this together as ‘debates concerning both the poetics and politics of our shared built environments.’

In some way opposed to Antonelli’s view of AI as ‘a benign spice that can be sprinkled on any profession’, in my opinion, to consider AI as a material for design is to understand the technology in it’s more potent form, emerging from its view as infrastructure capable of making and changing living environments drastically. It is to take into account affordances of its parts — actors, materials, uses, and effects — and consider its experience as a dynamic whole. It is as much about its use for production as it is about its ethical implication. And as Dove, Halskov, Forlizzi, and Zimmerman point out as a need for designers to create something that is ethical, purposeful and pragmatic.

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