Overview

Creative work is fundamentally and rapidly changing in the face of AI systems, shifting power and agency in the creative process. This project studies the algorithmic image search that creative professionals use for inspiration during the ideation process, incorporating of new forms of data and reconfiguring who and what is designing design.

Through a gallery installation and workshop, engaging with designers and gallery visitors, the project will develop a new approach to studying AI and creative work: visual facilitation. The visual device, in this case the gallery installation, incorporates a narrative visual storytelling of the research problems.

This project provides a dynamic opportunity to work using designers’ methods and toolkits– as designers work in a primarily visual language– to communicate academic research in a design-friendly lexicon. The in-person gallery installation will allow tacit knowledge a vehicle to become more explicit, and ultimately procure richer data collection.

The goal of this research is to determine how a widely used and poorly understood creative work practice, algorithmically-parsed image search for ideation, has changed, and what implications this change has for the creative design process. This artefact led facilitation methodology could be applied to other work contexts where verbal communication may not encapsulate research problems in a way that workers understand.