Hands-on ideation

The digital age has transformed many aspects of our everyday experience - not least what we do with our hands when busying ourselves with digital devices. But what function does continual hand activity have? The most obvious answer is that we need our hands to do things. The hand is associated with agency and power. Hands serve us. They are the instruments of executive action, our tools. The idea of the hand as a tool, however, isn't new - it was common also in classical times. Where Anaxagoras had argued that humans are intelligent because they have hands, Aristotle, and many after him, countered that they have hands because they are intelligent, as the hands perpetuate our will instrumentally. In contemporary society, we are encouraged to counter the apparent excesses of the digital world by returning to traditional activities such as knitting, gardening, or general tinkering. Using our hands to make things is a remainder of the grounding, satisfying bodily techniques of the past. And when designers talk about why they practise hands-on skills such as freehand drawing and model making, the answers tend to reflect the importance of discovery, authenticity, and fulfillment. This blog entry inspired by, Leader, D (2016) Hands: What We Do with Them - and Why.

"AI Slop"

GenAI has triggered what has become known as “AI slop” – images and text created using generative AI tools. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a derogatory connotation akin to "spam", "junk" or digital clutter" that signify unwanted, poor quality AI content in social media or in online search results. However, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said that new, AI-generated feeds were likely to come to Facebook and other Meta platforms: 'I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI-generated or AI-summarised content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way.'  Although AI-generated feeds on social media carries risks and ethical concerns, "spammy content" viewed critically may inspire ideation. Indeed ideation springs from many sources and the more we learn, experience, and try, the better we get at generating creative and meaningful ideas.