VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

New technologies often create concerns about worker displacement and what the widespread effects might be. CAD systems seemed to mark the end of architectural drawings and robots the end of manual labor, however, reality proved slightly different. Similarly, AI brings significant and immediate threats to the future of labor. In response to this social concern, a graduate seminar researched labor from historical and ethnographic perspectives. Generative AI was used to envision future scenarios informed by this past knowledge. The seminar used design fiction as a methodology to seek new trajectories of work that emerge from a technological infusion with generative AI. While the concepts of AI existed for decades, the conditions recently aligned to bring AI diffusion models to widespread use in design. Since 2022, AI image generation has seen widespread use by designers due to the low cost of entry and ease of use. The low barrier to entry produced a new democratization of design while conversely creating a greater need for professional visual literacy. The use of AI allowed for visualizing alternative pasts, presents, and futures of a craft. The teaching approach brings importance to the digital archive and other constituents of design. Archival information was addressed to gather contextualized imagery as an instrument of work, enabling a comprehensive understanding of its evolution. A world-building process required students to operate as ethnographers by visiting a space of labor and interviewing a craftsperson -the embodiment of accumulated experience- in their workspace. Such observations allowed them to emphasize the role of empathy when confronted with the habitus, a set of societal forces written into one’s body. Students traced the development of a craft and recognized distinctive elements that initiated the creation of speculative images, fostering iterative and critical thinking. Students mined the past to construct a more thoughtful future.