Performative ideas

Design ideation is a purposeful activity with a performative function in that the idea amounts to a proposal, plan or promise to be acted on. Moreover, the performative function of ideation relates to the semantics of ideas. That is, semantics is concerned with linguistic meaning that takes the idea beyond the visual expression of the material content (material culture). Verbal language, then, can enhance the meaning of the idea and help explain why some ideas are, or at least appear better than others. The reason for this is that ideas are sometimes just informed or reasoned guesses that designers present to their target audience, say a client. Designers, then, move about and develop the idea till they are satisfied that the idea would meet  the expectation of the client brief. In this pursuit, generative AI, as ideation tool and learning model, has a performative function and a performative capacity too. That is, AI offers support to designers to improve their performance in generating, developing and communicating ideas.