Project description

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has started making waves of machine innovation over the last decade, most recently the TTI (Text-To-Image) Models enable anyone to generate a high-fidelity image within 1 minute just from a brief English description, have not only created marketplaces for successful text prompt, but also caused debates on AI’s creativity.

This project talks about just that in the context of how design community reacts to the TTI Models. The impetus is two-fold, I am celebrating the possibilities of enhanced creativity (labour-wise and skill-wise), while interrogating the machine creation mechanism, calling into question does this really help design better and the system supporting this tool as a design aid.

TTI × DESIGN

I created a website titled "TTI × DESIGN" that archives AI-generated images of hundreds of chair designs by “Midjourney” with prompts based on the “Top 30 product design terms” (according to “ChatGPT”) and their synonyms. By exhibiting this prompt-image thesaurus, "TTI × DESIGN" is an effort to help designers identify AI's backward innovation, the subjectivity of Large Language Models (LLMs), more importantly, reflect on their ways of thinking during the process of employing language as an instrument in design. 

intro page-website "TTI * DESIGN" expand
intro page-website "TTI * DESIGN"
try thesaurus-website "TTI * DESIGN" expand
try thesaurus-website "TTI * DESIGN"
synonyms to images-website “TTI * DESIGN" expand
synonyms to images-website “TTI * DESIGN"
What is the next style to create???

Finally, by creating a prompt generator demo, which is programmed to randomly pick two adjectives from a wordlist of descriptive words for "good product design" (also according to “ChatGPT”), a snapshot of a dystopian future design scenario is imposed through mimicking designers' behaviour of heavily relying on TTI Models to design and endlessly seeking for more unique (less frequently used) words (combinations) to generate "original and creative" design.

prompt generator demo expand

Kelli Deng

Design Thesaurus: Language as an Instrument of Design?