Subscription Design

Abstract

The professional opportunities and ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on design are yet to reveal themselves fully. Nevertheless, Architecture's thirty-year project against postmodern iconography exemplifies how pre-existing concerns precondition AI's impact on design. Admittedly, there were pronounced conceptual and procedural differences in the methods developed during this period. However, a common belief in a pragmatic, instrumental approach to production has instigated a fundamental change in how one translates ideas into objects. This change, coinciding with the increasing use of the digital interface, now sees drawing as something one subscribes to rather than a set of techniques one uses to transcribe ideas. Contextualizing AI within a more extensive history of Architecture's experience with the digital environment, this paper will describe how pragmatism in Digital Architecture and Activism has encouraged designers to believe digital drawings enable an axiomatic translation of abstract ideas into real objects. At the same time, the most rudimentary of AI processes already contest this belief by presenting the disciplinary oddity of a digital technique based on images. AI not only reinvigorates architecture's often-problematic relationship to the semiotics of depictive imagery. It also problematizes issues of precedent and model by hiding how its algorithms select and combine sources. In raising questions around authorship and legitimacy, AI questions this thirty-year effort to recast disciplinary agency through instrumental drawing methods. Crucially, AI makes claiming authorship an issue again, while also asking whether axiomatic drawings can ever achieve prescribed socio-political goals.