Monday, August 10, 2026

Golden age of ideas

In the light of the universal impact of AI, and to paraphrase Winston Churchill as he was paying tribute to the Royal Air Force establishing air superiority over England in the second world war, one might quip: "Never in the field of creativity was so much owed by so many to so few". The many, here, the users of GenAI and the few the hard- and software pioneers and providers of AI models. Indeed GenAI is capable of producing instant ideas with a few prompts effectively widening participation in the design process, that is, towards democratising design itself. And so, GenAI has become the ubiquitous ideation tool leaving design students and practitioners alike, working alone or in groups, to "edit" or "curate" GenAI's results to their taste. In other words, designers have become as much editors and curators of  GenAI outputs as originators of their own ideas.