Co-Lab: The Designer and the Tool

Research / Thesis · SCI-Arc, UAI · 2023

How much of a design does the software really make? Co-Lab reflects on the agency designers hand over, from parametric rules to generative models.

Co-Lab is the thesis under most of the work on this site. Design software spent decades as a prosthesis, extending what a designer could reach. Clark and Chalmers called that an extension of mind. Then the software started proposing, and the thesis argues it became a second agent with an agency of its own.

Generated for the thesis with Midjourney. The same drafting room, a century apart.
Generated for the thesis with Midjourney. The same drafting room, a century apart.
The instruments changed, and with them how much of the drawing they do on their own.
The instruments changed, and with them how much of the drawing they do on their own.

Amplified creativity

In 2015 neural style transfer repainted a photograph as a Van Gogh. Three years later a GAN portrait sold at Christie's for 432,500 dollars. In 2019 Kartell presented the first mass-produced chair whose form was dictated by AI. Art absorbed the shock first because it could chase beauty with no constraints. Design has to work.

Philipp Schmitt and Steffen Weiss, The Chair Project, 2018, where the network dreams the chair and a human interprets it into something buildable.
Philipp Schmitt and Steffen Weiss, The Chair Project, 2018, where the network dreams the chair and a human interprets it into something buildable.
Prototype by M. Casey Rehm, 2024, thesis guide at SCI-Arc, straight from text and images to 3D model.
Prototype by M. Casey Rehm, 2024, thesis guide at SCI-Arc, straight from text and images to 3D model.

Form-giving

For two decades the frontier was form-finding. Rules go in, the software searches, and a shape comes out that nobody drew. Co-Lab argues the successor is form-giving. What comes back from a generative model is an approximation of the request, and the designer accepts it. Furniture was the test.

That acceptance is a small transfer of authorship, repeated hundreds of times per project.

Banca Wave, 2016, with Arturo Schofield and Pedro Broquedis. Sectioning in Grasshopper turned an intuitive sketch into a chain of rules.
Banca Wave, 2016, with Arturo Schofield and Pedro Broquedis. Sectioning in Grasshopper turned an intuitive sketch into a chain of rules.
Serie Topos, 2021. Topological optimization decides where material is needed. The designer sets the bounding box and the contact points, then chooses.
Serie Topos, 2021. Topological optimization decides where material is needed. The designer sets the bounding box and the contact points, then chooses.
Silla Generativa v5. A stress map of someone sitting drives agents toward the highest-load points, and their paths become the structure.
Silla Generativa v5. A stress map of someone sitting drives agents toward the highest-load points, and their paths become the structure.
The same chair marked up by hand. The output needed manual editing in Rhino and Blender before it could be fabricated. Acceptance is where form-giving starts.
The same chair marked up by hand. The output needed manual editing in Rhino and Blender before it could be fabricated. Acceptance is where form-giving starts.
Final chair cast in resin.
Final chair cast in resin.

The illusion of good design

A photoreal render that once took a studio days now arrives from a single prompt. It is easy to read that beauty as quality. The image is a reflection of the dataset it came from. It looks resolved without being resolved. Design stays incomplete without the input a model can only simulate. Emotion, memory, context, the reason the thing should exist at all.

Watch: Co-Lab: The Designer and the Tool

Designing the collaborator

At SCI-Arc the study moved inside the models. Prompts, CFG values, datasets, the pipelines connecting one program to the next. Building a tool raises a harder question than using one. The designer sets the agency that the tool will later exercise on the project. [Sketch](/work/sketch-gen-arch-platform/) came out of that, a platform that reads a site and generates massing before anyone draws.

The cybernetic diagram for Sketch, from site location through the massing solver to AI facade generation.
The cybernetic diagram for Sketch, from site location through the massing solver to AI facade generation.

As generation gets cheap, judgment gets expensive. Case Miller calls the result a digital selector, a designer choosing which of a hundred machine-made candidates answers the brief and able to say why. The practice continues at Judson Studios, folding AI workflows into stained glass, a craft that has survived every tool change since the middle ages.

Co-Lab: The Designer and the Tool