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Protohouse (2012) by Gilles Retsin and Softkill Design. A house structurally

optimized for minimal volume and uniform stress. Image: ArchDaily
Imagineering & Resurrections
Generative design charts new frontiers of imagination while recombining elements of
the past. It is incongruous with how our existing systems operate.
Chris Neels
Chris Neels
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Oct 31 · 8 min read
Generative design technologies give designers superpowers. They refer to a set of
algorithmically-based technologies that design for designers. They are not only
tools to make, but tools to think.
Generative design technologies work by having a designer specify the parameters of
a design problem. Using clever algorithms and a significant amount of processing
power, generative design software follows an evolutionary process, quickly cycling
through thousands — if not millions — of design choices, testing configurations and
learning from each iteration what works and what doesn’t. The designer then curates
and selects from innumerable generated options.
These tools are incredibly useful. They can optimize materials usage, speed up
design processes, create art, and imagine entirely new forms of products. They are
one enabler for transitioning from mass production to mass customization. The
future of generative design looks very bright.

Tensegrity nodes. Image: engineering.com courtesy of Arup

Yet a key issue with generative design technologies is their enablement of outputs
that don’t cleanly fit within the rules of our existing systems. While our laws are
built around staticity, categoricity, and scarcity, generative design systems
produce fluid, gradiential, and voluminous solutions.
For instance, patent law depends upon classifying technologies based on originality
and usefulness. Generative design produces innumerable designs that blur both
categorizations. They put into question who made what, who owns what, and who
should own what.
The incongruence between our social systems and generative design systems suggests
something will have to give if the uses of generative design broaden. This post
offers no such solutions. Instead, it outlines four areas of friction between
generative design technologies and our rules and laws. If these frictions are
believed to grow in magnitude, then we are behooved to respond with correspondent
urgency.
I. (De)Personalized Media
For many of their use cases, generative design technologies do not depend upon
prior data to generate solutions. For example, a bridge can be designed by
addressing a set of parameters without needing to reference preexisting structures.
But data can serve as useful parameters to guide the creation of solutions. This is
illustrated in a leaked internal video from Google in 2016 that highlights a
speculative use case where detailed data about users are used to design
“personalized” products. In such a scenario, our future selves receive not only
customized media feeds, but customized physical media.
The Selfish Ledger (2016) by Google. Source: The Verge
The prospect of receiving tailored products that recognize our unique needs is
exciting, but raises questions about the appropriate paradigm for this to be done.
One characterization of the current paradigm of the digital was put forward by
Harvard Sociologist Shoshana Zuboff. She calls it surveillance capitalism, a market
logic where companies accumulate vast amounts of data from human experience,
organize this data into predictive models of future behaviour, and auction the
ability for external entities to modify this behaviour. It is a system where what
is “given” to us is a means to others’ ends.
With the possibility of personal objects in our lives to be shaped by the data from
our lives, we need to be cautious about the business models behind how these data
are collected and used. If the availability of a digital system hinges on its
ability to modify our behaviour to consume more, do we want our most intimate
belongings to do the same?
Questions determining the rules and boundaries digital services have not yet been
resolved. They will compound as the digital realm merges with the physical sphere.
II. Refactored Authenticity
Generative design technologies can be used to emulate and reconfigure things that
already exist. There has already been much discussion on the impact of “deepfakes”#
— an application of deep learning that creates fake photos, videos, and writing
based on their real counterparts. But there’s been less discussion on how entire
works might be pulled apart, synthesized, and resurrected.
The art world is now witnessing “new works” from “dead artists.” One famous example
is The Next Rembrandt, a 3D printed painting that emulates the style of Rembrandt,
a long-dead 17th century Dutch painter. The project was initiated by ING—a Dutch
multinational banking group “looking for a way to innovate and stand out amongst
its competitors”—and leveraged the technical know-how of Microsoft. The produced
portrait “consists of 148 million pixels and is based on 168,263 fragments from
Rembrandt’s portfolio.”

The Next Rembrandt (2016). It’s not a Rembrandt, but it looks like one. Source: The
Next Rembrandt
“We looked at a number of Rembrandt paintings, and we scanned their surface
texture, their elemental composition, and what kinds of pigments were used. That’s
the kind of information you need if you want to generate a painting by Rembrandt
virtually.” — Joris Dik, Technical University Delft
More recently, researchers at University College London used a neural transfer
style technique to “recover” a painted-over painting underneath Picasso’s famous
“Blue Guitarist.” Their process used infrared and x-ray images of the hidden
painting, along with “style” images of Picasso’s other works, to recreate the
painting. The underlying algorithms are generalizable to convert any image into the
style of another artist.
Would Rembrandt and Picasso be rolling in their graves over algorithms reproducing
their works, or would they approve of these rebellious acts of (re)creation? What
about living artists?
Like the aforementioned patent law, our systems are designed around categories.
They adjudicate whether things are true or false, originals or copies, patents or
patent violations, and so on.
Generate designs introduce granulations of truth, of reality, or trust, and of
value. New rules may need to be written—or maybe even generated.
III. Adversarial Networks
Beyond the exploitive nature of deepfakes, generative design technologies have the
potential to be used for explicitly malicious purposes. For instance, generative
adversarial networks (GANs), a type of algorithm, have been identified as a cyber-
threat by MIT Technology Review for their ability to hack systems. A yet-to-be-seen
risk is that generative design could facilitate the creation of previously
unimaginable weapons.
The Shuty (2015) by Defence Distributed. A semi-automatic gun made of metal and
plastic parts. The plastic parts are 3D printed, while the metal parts can be
purchased from typical hardware stores. Source: YouTube
Online networks compound this potential for harm by proliferating and ubiquitizing
adversarial algorithms and designs.
One such example is how the blueprints and CAD models for a 3D printable gun were
spread online shortly after its invention. While a U.S. federal judge did grant a
nationwide injunction against Defense Distributed—the organization publishing this
design—once designs are shared, they can rarely be unshared.
There is no easy answer for limiting adversarial uses of generative design
technologies and the spread of their designs. Developers would be hard-pressed to
code constraints into their tools. Designers could be required to opt-into codes of
conduct—but these can be ignored. Governments or platforms could attempt to monitor
content, but past efforts have been largely ineffectual.
Stewart Brand once quipped, “information wants to be free.” The confluence of the
internet and generative design technologies suggests a step further in this
direction—both literally and figuratively—and it’s going to be dangerous.
IV. Generating Like a State
Generative design technologies are excellent for optimization, but they can only
optimize what can be measured. This can introduce a number of design problems,
stemming from the premises that:
Measures only a yield a partial picture of reality.
Measures can be distorted, especially when subjects know they are being measured.
What doesn’t, or can’t, get measured can get deprioritized.
This bias towards measurability is prescient in smart city initiatives. Adam
Greenfield writes that underpinning these initiatives is an implicit worldview that
“the world is in principle perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable and their
relations capable of being meaningfully encoded in the state of a technical system,
without bias or distortion […] So what if information crucial to the formulation of
sound civic policy is somehow absent from their soundings, resides in the space
between them, or is derived from the interaction between whatever quality of the
world we set out to measure and our corporeal experience of it?”
Before smart cities, James C. Clarke called this mindset high modernism. In his
book, “Seeing Like a State,” he argues that well-intentioned large scale projects
fail from downplaying complex interdependencies that are not—and cannot—be fully
understood in favour of making things legible. It leads us to cities like Brasilia:
rationally designed, yet devoid of inner life.
Generative design faces the same issues. Evolving Floorplans, an experimental
research project by Joel Smith, highlights this. The project explores speculative,
optimized floor plan layouts for an elementary school—considering things like
traffic flow, material usage, and fire escape paths. The project is ingenious, yet
we should be cautious about how such thinking applies to real world contexts.
Things like social interactions between children cannot be fully understood through
quantification.

Evolving Floorplans (2018) by Joel Smith. An elementary school. Left: Optimized for
minimizing traffic flow between classes and material usage. Right: Also optimized
for minimizing fire escape paths. Source: Joelsmith.net
For this issue, there does seem to be a clear solution: a thoughtful design
process. Autodesk, one of the creators of generative design software, used its
software to design its Toronto office. By producing a well-framed problem, engaging
with its employees, and carefully curating solutions, they landed on an original
design that no human, and no computer, would have been able to independently
conceive.

Toronto Office (2018) by Autodesk. Source: YouTube

Yet, if many of the things in our lives are any illustration, thoughtful design is
far from ubiquitous. Generative design technologies will only design based on the
things that can be measured, and it’s all too easy to overlook the things that
cannot be measured. Fostering vigilance of these considerations across the full
breadth of products and services generatively designed could be an ongoing
challenge.
To Sum Up
Generative design technologies are supertools that introduce a new practice of
design around framing problems, observing incomprehensible operations, and curating
results. Their often alien-like outputs reflect their alien inner workings that
inexplicably weave together shards of the past and the hypothetical. They are
exceptionally useful.
A brief look at the products of generative design within our current social systems
suggests that either tools, rules, or laws may need to changing—or regeneration—to
actuate future benefits and mitigate harms.
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Thanks to Edward Sudall.
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Chris Neels
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Chris Neels
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STS, Strategy, and Futures. Currently at University College London. Previously Idea
Couture and Deloitte.
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