Design Tools for Alternative Narratives

Abstract

Three stories narrate professional and design practices that expand the Galaxy of Design, testifying to comprehensive experimental approaches, from the products produced, to the languages and techniques employed, to the themes and meanings. A studio, a scholarly research agency and a professional, who further shift and shred the boundaries of the discipline. The first is Superflux, which takes us to an experimental and speculative dimension, working on multimedia narratives in which the artifact becomes a programmatic, post-tech narrative pretext, representative of a consistently decentralized vision of man in the Planet. Forensic Architecture, which using digital technologies to analyze the built environment, places design as a methodological approach at the service of investigations of human rights violations. Finally Thomas Thwaites, for whom the project (which can be performance, device, installation or film) is always about finding answers to fundamental questions about our relationship with time, technology and nature.

Venturing into the Age of AI: Insights and Perspectives

“…But, as underlined by Del Campo ( 2004), the impact of AI in design and in the relationship between human and machine has to be read in terms of language renewal, creative opportunity, theoretical explorations and not in terms of preconceived certainties regarding the final aesthetical configurations of objects. New technological paradigms, new network-based systems, new computational structures, which are just some of the constituting elements of the AI, can be understandably seen as critical for the design approach, but not so much if we consider them as services or tools to manage the now essential digital dimension of creativity, the complexity of the processes of ideation and production, the levels of user's active participation and the interdisciplinary dialogue in the work teams (Cattabriga & Joler, 2023). But these tools seem to be something different compared, for examples, to those that appeared some years ago within the CAD/CAM systems; and the difference is that now we are facing to 'tools for thinking' instead of 'tools for making' that are going beyond our traditional conception of modern science applied to the design ambit .…”

Artificial Intelligence for Design The Artificial Intelligence of Objects

“…But, as underlined by Del Campo (2004), the impact of AI in design and in the relationship between human and machine has to be read in terms of language renewal, creative opportunity, theoretical explorations and not in terms of preconceived certainties regarding the final aesthetical configurations of objects. New technological paradigms, new network-based systems, new computational structures, which are just some of the constituting elements of the AI, can be understandably seen as critical for the design approach, but not so much if we consider them as services or tools to manage the now essential digital dimension of creativity, the complexity of the processes of ideation and production, the levels of user's active participation and the interdisciplinary dialogue in the work teams (Cattabriga & Joler, 2023). But these tools seem to be something different compared, for examples, to those that appeared some years ago within the CAD/CAM systems; and the difference is that now we are facing to 'tools for thinking' instead of 'tools for making' that are going beyond our traditional conception of modern science applied to the design ambit (Carpo, 2017).…”