An Intent of Collaboration: On Agencies between Designers and Emerging (Intelligent) Technologies

TL;DR

This paper explores how designers can maintain creative agency when collaborating with emerging intelligent technologies like LLMs, emphasizing introspection, understanding technology, and adjusting human-technology dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for designers to preserve their creative agency by engaging with intelligent technologies through introspection, understanding, and relationship management.

Findings

A power dynamic of agency exists between designers and LLMs.

Designers can regain agency through introspection and understanding.

Adjusting the human-technology relationship is crucial for effective collaboration.

Abstract

Amidst the emergence of powerful intelligent technologies such as LLMs and text-to-image AIs that promise to enhance creative processes, designers face the challenges of remaining empowered and creative while working with these foreign digital partners. While generative AIs offer versatile, informative, and occasionally poetic outcomes, their lack of embodied knowledge presents an even greater challenge to designers in gaining fruitful outcomes, such as in the field of Digital Craftsmanship. In this project, three designers embarked on a three-month experimental journey with an intention to co-create with Google's LLM as a potential intelligent partner to investigate how it will influence the designers' creativity. We found that a power dynamic of agencies exists between the LLM and the designer, in which the designer can easily lose their creative agency. Regaining the designer's creative agency involves introspection into their own creative process, a structural understanding of the specific emerging technology involved, and deliberate adjustments to the dynamics of the human-technology relationship. We propose paying attention to the designer's inner world and parties of agencies when engaging with emerging intelligent technologies through three aspects: the sensitivity towards a creative process as cognitive activities; the active investigation into specific technology's capability; and the adjustment towards an appropriate working relationship between the designer and the emerging technology.