Imagining a Future of Designing with AI: Dynamic Grounding, Constructive Negotiation, and Sustainable Motivation
This work addresses the problem of integrating AI into design processes for human designers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories and speculative scenarios without empirical validation.
The paper explores a future design workflow enhanced by AI, proposing three affordances—dynamic grounding, constructive negotiation, and sustainable motivation—derived from activity and communication theory to leverage large AI models for design support, illustrated through a design fiction prototype called Squirrel Game.
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.