AI feeding ideation

Generative artificial intelligence, GAI is already being employed as a tool by designers in what is referred to as machine co-creativity and augmented design, with the technology not only facilitating ideation but also used as a visioning tool (text-to-image software) for community engagement for public project. GAI, moreover, is capable of developing and handling the more practical aspects of design including detail plans, such as figuring out where plumbing and power lines belong in buildings..But there are limits to GAI applications, notably issues of quality and data bias - AI ‘learns’ by analysing existing data so it is afflicted by evidence of in-built bias - and underline the risk of, say, an entirely AI-planned housing project. That is, while GAI is useful as a tool to help create an architectural image, or to generate a seamless to-do-list for housing developers, it is not a blueprint for a complete building, at least for now.

Unmeasurable ideas

'A great building', wrote the architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974), 'must begin with the unmeasureable, go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasurable'. The same thinking, arguably, may be applied to ideation. That is, ideas that spring, or emerge out of dreams or relatedness. And whether the idea takes centre stage or appears in the margins, first thoughts seem unmeasurable. But, in the development of an idea, measurable means are employed to make the idea visible or comprenhensible, and this in order to express and communicate the idea, visually or verbally. And only as far as the idea is made real, that is, realised, does it become measurable. But not necessarily so because ideas often carry intangible qualities in which case the idea, in the end, must remain unmeasurable. Could it be then that the measureable idea begins where dreams end?