Widespread access to generative AI is changing design practices as we speak. In this summit we will ask how this is happening and how to evaluate it – politically, socially, technically.

Although the question of artificial intelligence has a long history, things have changed so dramatically in recent years that some thinkers have suggested that we have entered an era of post-human design. We will focus on the short history of generative AI, machine learning, and predictive algorithms and the explosion of tools and methods which open access to them has produced. Thanks to diffusion and large language models, which have become regular collaborators in many design processes, designers have the ability to talk to computers in ordinary language and ask them to do complicated things, like code, draw on archives, analyze and optimize data, even build new models and worlds.

We will consider the implications of this explosion across all scales of practice at GSAPP, and the difference it is already making, in a day-long gathering November 1, 2024.

In a series of panels, participants will present their work and discuss how their methods and practices have altered with new AI tools. We will ask about the difference between human and algorithmic intelligence. We will see how AI can be designed locally with local knowledge. We will address the systems architecture and politics behind AI in a more-than- human world. We will speculate on future modes of design practice that generative AI allows, or does not allow. We will query our queries – text to image, text to code, text to video, text to the unknown in the future. We will assess quantitative versus qualitative measures guiding AI policies in urban contexts, as well as what might motivate parameters in urban design.

By the end of the day, we hope to have introduced and interrogated the affordances of these new tools in relation to what we do as designers. The conference will include participatory methods intended to gather the perspectives of the audience and the speakers. It is our hope that the findings can be used as the basis for future discussion about AI and its impact on design environments.

Click here to register for the conference.