In this third installment of our GenAI workshop series at DIS, we focus on ‘stopsigns’—the blockages that impede progress in design research with GenAI. These stopsigns manifest as both semantic barriers (political, social, or mental frameworks) and pragmatic hurdles (technical limitations or implementation challenges) that persist despite the rapid advancements since the GenAI boom. Such stopsigns present a productive tension—they often contain partial truths worthy of consideration while simultaneously being shortsighted in ways that prevent progression. From blanket rejection to uncritical acceptance, these barriers affect how meaningfully we engage with GenAI’s potential. Our workshop welcomes both returning and first-time participants to share their experiences with these persistent challenges and work together to develop practical solutions. Through analysis of real cases and hands-on activities, we’ll build strategies for moving beyond these obstacles while acknowledging their legitimate concerns. Our goal is to foster more thoughtful integration of GenAI in design research and practice.

This one day workshop will explore the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in design research and practice. Generative technologies are developing rapidly and many designers are using them. Yet, there remains little published work on the use of GenAI in design. Our goal is to not only showcase the potential of GenAI for design, but to engage in discussions of its shortcomings and opportunities as they have been already articulated by scholars. By synthesizing both published and unpublished works, we will develop best practices, ethical considerations, and future research directions for the use of GenAI in design. We will explore a range of topics and themes, including leveraging the characteristics of GenAI for design, mapping the diverse applications of GenAI in design, envisioning a framework for design, and guiding future work on GenAI in design research. Ultimately, we hope to provide a roadmap for the integration of GenAI into the design research process and to encourage designers and researchers to explore the potential of GenAI in a thoughtful and deliberate way.

Creative conversation among designers and stakeholders in a design project enables new ideas to naturally originate and evolve. Language allows for the exchange of values, priorities, and past experience whilst keeping solution forms usefully ambiguous. Yet there is a danger that only the language of people directly involved in the design process gets to be heard, limiting how inclusively the problems are interpreted, which in turn can impede how complex design problems are addressed. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have shown the exclusionary spaces that are often inhabited by designers, engineers, and developers of new artefacts and technologies. On the other hand, text data used to train language models for machine learning applications have the potential to highlight societal biases in ways that designers can utilise. In this paper, we report the results of an exploratory study using AI text generation to synthesize and narrate opinions and experiences that may be unfamiliar to designers. Three pairs of designers were given a complex socio-technical problem to solve. Of these, two pairs interacted with an AI text generator during the task, while one pair acted as a baseline condition. Analysing the conversational exchanges between the designers and the designers & AI, we observe how the use of AI leads to prompting nuanced interpretations of problems and ideas, opening up the objective problem and design lenses and interpretations. Finally, we discuss how the designers (re)assign different roles to the AI to suit their creative purposes.