Imagining a Future of Designing with AI: Dynamic Grounding, Constructive Negotiation, and Sustainable Motivation

We ideate a future design workflow that involves AI technology. Drawing from activity and communication theory, we attempt to isolate the new value large AI models can provide design compared to past technologies. We arrive at three affordances – dynamic grounding, constructive negotiation, and sustainable motivation – that summarize latent qualities of natural language-enabled foundation models that, if explicitly designed for, can support the process of design. Through design fiction, we then imagine a future interface as a diegetic prototype, the story of Squirrel Game, that demonstrates each of our three affordances in a realistic usage scenario. Our design process, terminology, and diagrams aim to contribute to future discussions about the relative affordances of AI technology with regard to collaborating with human designers.