AI as co-design partner

Co-design, or participatory design is an approach to design which focuses on processes and procedures of design. It has been used in many settings and at various scales. Rooted in work with trade unions in the Nordic countries, this approach has also a political dimension of user empowerment and democratisation. From this persepctive, co-design requires the end user's participation: not only in decision making but also in idea generation. Moreover, it is argued that designers create more innovative ideas and concepts when working within a co-design environment with others than they do when creating ideas on their own. Interestingly, AI has now entered co-design environments through large language models, LLMs, such as chatbots, which are a type of artificial intelligence algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and masive data sets to understand, summarise, generate and predict new content. LLMs, then, are able to process vast amounts of text data, mostly harvested from the Internet providing a basis to generate and communicate new ideas and concepts. Moreover, LLMs use natural language to simulate human conversation.The model, then, as a conversational chatbot becomes effectively a co-design partner.

Synthetic ideation

Synthetic media is a catch-all term to describe video, image, text, or voice that has been fully or partially generated using artificial intelligence. So, synthetic media includes ideas that have been fully or partially generated and presented using generative artificial intelligence, GAI. Conversely, non-synthetic media can be any other media, that is, media that is produced by human input. Take a freehand idea sketch, for example. Drawn entirely by a human, the rough sketch would fall under non-synthetic media, or non-synthetic ideation. Now think of a human-generated freehand sketch which has been digitised and where an GAI image editor is used to add a feature to the sketch. This new (altered) image is partially generated by AI (the picture being modified by algorithms), and we can thus say the idea, as represented by the image is “synthetic.” Ideas thus generated, or synthetic ideation may pose the question; "who is better at ideation - GAI or human?" GAI has brought a revolution in image editing, that is, a technology that turns manual image editing processes into automtic or semi-automatic actions. GAI, then, in drawing on a vast and varied image bank (datasets), and at speed, is a powerful ideation tool. Yet GAI is not a simple substitute for human decision-making and to fully appreciate the idea, the discerning eye (judgement) will be human, at least for now.