GenAI feeds ideation

Generative artificial intelligence, GenAI 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. But there are limits to GenAI applications, notably issues of context, quality and data bias. That is, GenAI ‘learns’ by analysing existing data so it is afflicted by evidence of in-built bias - which highlights the risk of, say, relying on GenAI for a housing concept. That is, while GenAI is useful as a tool for designers 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 scheme, notably for aspects of detailing or from a structural engineering perspective, for which BIM (Building Information Modelling) is typically used as interface for a unified design environment.

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?