Growth and Decay: Spaceships

In order to integrate emergence into the design process, I needed to see how people would respond to using it as a creative tool. I asked a few designers to use Emergent GUI to design their own spaceships. You can see their results below.

Initially, everyone was a little confused as to how Emergent GUI worked. They approached the problem like any other design problem: come up with an idea and execute it using the tools at hand. However, when they tried to recreate their spaceship on Emergent GUI, they were unable to do so. This led to frustration and anger, not words you want to associate with the design process.

It was only when I told them to use Emergent GUI as a way of exploring new ideas did the designers begin making progress. Rather than fighting the program, they began to enjoy seeing what shapes and forms would be produced. I would often hear cries of “Woah” and “That’s a cool shape” and one designer even exclaimed “That’s it! That’s my spaceship” when he was excited by a particular form. Of course, the shapes produced by Emergent GUI were far from perfect and required a lot of work and development before they could actually become spaceships. Nevertheless, they were a good starting point and provided the designers with solutions they would not have thought of themselves.

Overall, Emergent GUI’s user testing shows that there is real potential to use computational techniques in more creative portions of design. One of the main challenges is to work with designers to integrate these tools into their process.  I hope to better understand the interaction between designers and technology and ultimately create tools that allow us to push the boundaries of design further and further.