Across these projects, a pattern emerges. AI is not used to finalize work. It is used to generate situations.
In each case, the output is not the answer, but the start of another question. This is why the language of “tool” falls short. Tools are supposed to be predictable. They extend your intention cleanly into the world. AI, used this way, does not do that. It introduces noise. It reflects back assumptions you did not know you had. It collapses difference. It invents things. It stabilizes too quickly, then surprises you somewhere else. Those are not bugs to eliminate. They are properties to work with.
Designers already know how to do this. We know how to work with materials that resist us. Ink bleeds. Code breaks. Archives contradict themselves. The work is not to force compliance, but to develop a practice that can learn from what happens.
What I worry about most right now is not that AI will replace designers. It is that we will approach AI with too little ambition. If we treat it only as a faster way to do what we already know how to do, we get more of the same—faster maps, faster interfaces, faster summaries.
If we treat AI as a medium, we get something else. We get new ways of seeing collections, new forms of spatial and visual knowledge, new kinds of interfaces that do not just present information but expose its structure, its gaps, its biases. We also get new responsibilities: to be more critical, more explicit about process, more willing to show uncertainty and harness it as part of the doing of the work.
In the studio, this feels less like a revolution and more like a continuation, yet another material showing up on the table, just as disruptive as all the others—volatile, powerful, uneven, full of possibility. Something you do not just use. Something you work through.
— Read on www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/articles/ai-as-a-design-medium-rodenbeck/
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