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?

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.

Return of analogue design tools

The pandemic put constraints and limitations on in-person studio and workshop activites. But UK's top-rated architecture schools, The Bartlett and The Architectural Association, AA, at their respective end-of-year exhibition 2023, demonstrated a strong return to studio-based working and the use of analogue tools, such as freehand drawing, collaging, and physical modelling. At the Bartlett, the summer show incorporated a diverse range of student physical models, hand drawings and installations encouraging a thoughtful dialogue between students and visitors about the future of architecture and its part to play in shaping the world we live in. Similarly, the AA Projects Review expressed the variety of ways that the AA units and programmes explore physical objects. As part of the projects created by the students, they represented a year of physical experimentation across the school, and exploited a vast range of techniques and materials. Models within these projects were the result of a hands-on, iterative process that uncovers new methods of exploring the built environment. Thinking, doing and making in anlogue modes in architecture schools, then, have returned in a significant way, which is not to say that the use and power of digital tools have diminished but rather that analogue and digital tools and outcomes complement each other. Indeed, in addressing the many challenges to architects today - environmental, socio-cultural or economic, the students of both schools displayed skillful and imaginative use of both analogue and digital tools to materialise, fabricate and communicate their designs. Both shows are on view online.

Pandora - box & aidiom

According to Silicon Valley mythology, Alphabet, the giant of Big Tech, and owner of Google, got so angry when TikTok, the video hosting service stole a march on Google-owned YouTube and gifted it to mankind. And so, Alphabet decided humans needed to be punished for this. Alphabet commanded Google, its search engine arm, to create a version of artificial intelligence- an AI-powered image generator, GenAI in short. Crafted from silicon, and trained on terabytes of web crawl data from across the internet, GenAI received the gifts of wisdom, beauty, kindness, peace, generosity, and health from Alphabet and the other tech giants. Or so it was thought. But GenAI was also taught lying and trickery as evidenced in social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Yet the tech giants decided that GenAI carried gifts for the humans. Humans, moreover, were created to be curious, and couldn’t stay away from GenAI and the urge to apply it to everyday life. But horrible things then flew out of GenAI, including greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death. All of life’s miseries had been let out into the world. The last thing remaining inside GenAI was hope. Ever since, humans have been able to hold onto this hope in order to survive the wickedness that GenAI had let out. Note: In Greek mythology, Pandora’s box was a large jar carried by Pandora who forgot the warning that the jar contained all manner of misery and evil. She opened the jar, from which the evils flew out over the earth. Hope alone remained inside. Pandora still serves as a cautionary tale about the complexities of human nature, the consequences, and responsibility of curiosity, the inevitability of suffering, and the importance of hope.

Prompting for ideas

The fast development of generative artificial intelligence, GenAI suggests that AI-powered image generation is increasingly becoming a starting point for designers in the early phases of the design process, perhaps even becoming a default position for ideation. And so, rather than to begin the ideation process with a pencil and a blank piece of paper, designers have the option of going straight to keyboard prompting using text-to-image generative models such as DALL-E or Midjourney. To ideate, then, is to prompt. But to do so is complementing rather than substituting analogue ideation tools, such as pen and paper because the human aspect of designing cannot easily be replaced by GenAI. However, after several prompt iterations, the outcome may be the aidea. Indeed research shows that when designers apply text-to-image models they improve their individual creative performance. And so, GenAI is showing how it can be used to support and enhance human creativity.

Photogenic drawing

Long before smartphones and digital cameras were everywhere, inventors in the 1830s and 1840s were experimenting with new ways to capture pictures. One innovator, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), a true polymath, on a visit to Italy in 1833, and using a camera lucida, this simple draftsman’s aid produced a refracted image of the Italian landscape superimposed on the pages of his sketchbook. It seemed a simple task to trace the features of the village buildings, lake, and distant mountains with his pencil. But Talbot was frustrated by his poor drawing skills that day with the camera lucida leading him to recollect his experiences ten years earlier with another drafting aid, the camera obscura—a small wooden box with a lens at one end that projected the scene before it onto a piece of frosted glass at the back, where the artist could trace the outlines on thin paper. The camera obscura, too, had left Talbot with unsatisfactory results, but both experiments prompted Talbot to jot down thoughts about experiments he could conduct at home to see if Nature, through the action of light on material substances, might be brought to draw her own picture. He called his new discovery “the art of photogenic drawing.” Talbot’s early photogenic drawings, however, remained fugitive, for they were only partially stabilized with a solution of salt. A more permanent means of “fixing” the image with hyposulfite of soda was proposed by Talbot’s friend the eminent scientist Sir John Herschel; “hypo” was adopted by Talbot for most prints beginning in the early 1840s and is still used today as a fixer for black-and-white photographs. Moreover, Talbot demonstrated the commercial viability of his invention by means of a photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, published in parts beginning in 1844. But more than this; whether a personal project or a brief set by a third party, photography can help generate, develop and communicate ideas. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tlbt/hd_tlbt.htm