An Intent of Collaboration: On Agencies between Designers and Emerging (Intelligent) Technologies

2026-03-12

AI Summary

This study addresses the risk of designers losing creative agency when collaborating with large language models (LLMs), which can undermine creative outcomes. Through a three-month co-creation experiment involving three designers and Google’s LLM, the research integrates design practice with reflective inquiry to reconceptualize creative agency across three dimensions: designers’ internal cognition, technological affordances, and human–AI collaborative dynamics. The findings reveal the power asymmetries inherent in human–AI creative partnerships and demonstrate how structured understanding and relational adaptation can effectively restore designers’ agency. By articulating these mechanisms, the work offers both a theoretical framework and practical strategies for fostering equitable and effective human–AI collaboration in creative domains within the intelligent era.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Uses of LLMs and GenAI for marketplace design, bidding, and strategic interactions

Abstract

Amidst the emergence of powerful intelligent technologies such as LLMs and text-to-image AIs that promise to enhance creative processes, designers face the challenges of remaining empowered and creative while working with these foreign digital partners. While generative AIs offer versatile, informative, and occasionally poetic outcomes, their lack of embodied knowledge presents an even greater challenge to designers in gaining fruitful outcomes, such as in the field of Digital Craftsmanship. In this project, three designers embarked on a three-month experimental journey with an intention to co-create with Google's LLM as a potential intelligent partner to investigate how it will influence the designers' creativity. We found that a power dynamic of agencies exists between the LLM and the designer, in which the designer can easily lose their creative agency. Regaining the designer's creative agency involves introspection into their own creative process, a structural understanding of the specific emerging technology involved, and deliberate adjustments to the dynamics of the human-technology relationship. We propose paying attention to the designer's inner world and parties of agencies when engaging with emerging intelligent technologies through three aspects: the sensitivity towards a creative process as cognitive activities; the active investigation into specific technology's capability; and the adjustment towards an appropriate working relationship between the designer and the emerging technology.

Problem

• creative agency
• human-AI collaboration
• designer-technology relationship
• embodied knowledge
• generative AI

Innovation

• creative agency
• human-AI collaboration
• designer-technology dynamics
• embodied knowledge
• generative AI