Imagining a Future of Designing with AI: Dynamic Grounding, Constructive Negotiation, and Sustainable Motivation

TL;DR

This paper envisions a future design workflow integrating AI, highlighting three key affordances—dynamic grounding, constructive negotiation, and sustainable motivation—that can enhance collaborative design processes.

Contribution

It introduces three novel affordances of language-enabled AI models for design, supported by a future interface prototype and a new conceptual framework.

Findings

Identified three core affordances of AI in design: dynamic grounding, constructive negotiation, sustainable motivation.

Proposed a future design interface demonstrating these affordances in a realistic scenario.

Contributed a new terminology and diagrams to facilitate future discussions on AI's role in design.

Abstract

We ideate a future design workflow that involves AI technology. Drawing from activity and communication theory, we attempt to isolate the new value large AI models can provide design compared to past technologies. We arrive at three affordances -- dynamic grounding, constructive negotiation, and sustainable motivation -- that summarize latent qualities of natural language-enabled foundation models that, if explicitly designed for, can support the process of design. Through design fiction, we then imagine a future interface as a diegetic prototype, the story of Squirrel Game, that demonstrates each of our three affordances in a realistic usage scenario. Our design process, terminology, and diagrams aim to contribute to future discussions about the relative affordances of AI technology with regard to collaborating with human designers.