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Whose design process?
The dynamics of designing with generative creation
“In computational art and design, many responses to the questions of what and why continue historic lines of creative inquiry centered on procedure, connection, abstraction, authorship, the nature of time, and the role of chance.” (Levin & Brain, 2021).
The first relevant attempts of using computers as a means of creative production happened in the 1960s when programmers and artists began experimenting with the machines to generate shapes and sounds. In the beginning, the introduction of computers to the creative community faced resistance, especially because of their mechanical, mathematical, and multidisciplinary nature. At the core of the debate was the comprehension that creating artifacts alongside computational systems involved ceding a part of the creative process — which before belonged entirely to humans— to the machine. Such a shift naturally challenged the conventional conception of ownership, as it raised an intuitive question:
Who should be considered the author of a given piece of intellectual production, art, or design when computers are involved? The human, the machine, or both?
With time, and as computers got more popular, such resistance diminished as creators embraced digital techniques, whether by choice or pressure of the market. In any case, an important first remark for our discussion is the realization that sharing authorship with machines is not something new brought by AI, but rather something that has been unfolding throughout the past decades and that was more recently intensified. This is also why we are now seeing a re-edition of the ownership debate I discussed before.
Nonetheless, the possibility of pairing with computational intelligence has since the beginning motivated professionals to explore these machines as a fruitful creative medium.
For designers, for example, accustomed to apprehending current technologies and repurposing them to the tasks at hand, such exploration…
