Diversifying Design Cultures in the Era of Generative AI (GenAI)
Presented by School of Design and Architecture Swinburne University of Technology
DETAILS
Free, booking required
The Junction
The Junction, Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn VIC, Australia
Diversifying Design Cultures in the Era of Generative AI (GenAI) is a workshop, discussion and exhibition that showcases the challenges and novel design processes of integrating diverse cultural narratives and perspectives into AI-driven design, while addressing and overcoming GenAI misrepresentations. This initiative empowers designers to critically engage with GenAI tools to enrich culture and society by expressing, questioning, testing, and creating meaningful design artefacts.
The exhibition showcases the processes and outcomes of emerging designers exploring questions of design cultural representation, inclusivity, and the ethical use of technology in design.
The workshop invites designers, including design researchers, academics, and students, to explore Midjourney/Dall-E AI tools, recognise its limitations, and learn how to work around its limitations to improve authenticity, detail, and cultural accuracy in the AI-generated output.
The talk will bring together designers to discuss how diverse design cultures can flourish despite the GenAI limitations with showing diversity of design cultures. What do designers need to overcome Generative AI misrepresentations and enrich culture and society through diverse and thoughtful design artefacts? Why is it important that design tools reflect diverse cultural narratives accurately? How can designers advance and innovate design cultures while preserving and honouring cultural nuances?
Participants
Fanny Suhendra
Fanny is a design researcher and educator in Indonesia and Australia. As a Chinese-Indonesian designer educated in the West, she recognizes that hegemonic Western perspectives continue to dominate design education and practice. Her work challenges this exclusivity by fostering cultural literacy, empathetic practice, and user-centered methodologies in both pedagogy and research. For this workshop, she will guide participants in critically reflecting on their design identities and questioning how they engage with AI in their creative processes, encouraging more diverse, inclusive and context-aware, pluralistic approaches to design.
Linus Tan
Linus is a design researcher, educator, and architectural designer specialising in Generative AI and design cognition. His research explores how designers engage with AI-driven design tools to understand the cognitive shifts and biases embedded in AI-generated design. As the workshop facilitator and talk member of this event, Linus brings a practice-led perspective on how designers can critically engage with AI, overcome misrepresentations, and innovate within design cultures. You can see more of his works at www.linustan.com