Ceci n’est pas une Chaise: Emerging Practices in Designer-AI Collaboration

Emerging practices of using ‘off the shelf’ AI as a creative partner in design processes are receiving increasing attention in design research. This paper takes the well-known concept of ‘framing’ in design, along with the Schönian concept of ‘surprise’ to explore how a human-AI dialogue could work. The approach taken is practice-based, with the human designer documenting her process of inquiry and decision making. We show how artificial creativity is expressed through misfiring object detection algorithms, and further how these ‘mistakes’ can be perceived and interpreted by the human designer. The contribution of the research is in laying the foundations for a novel human-AI dialogic practice.