We were recently announced as awardees for the Sidara Urban Research Seed Grant in partnership with the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism!
Titled “Beyond Prompts: Analogy-Enhanced Generative AI Tools for Urban Design”, the project aims to engage with the hard problems of subjectivity in design ideation, and to develop visualization tools with analogical reasoning capabilities. Our team is led by Prof. Randall Davis from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and includes Prof. Takehiko Nagakura from the MIT Department of Architecture, as well as myself.
Read more here: https://lcau.mit.edu/research/beyond-prompts-analogy-enhanced-generative-ai-tools-urban-design
Summary:
State-of-the-art Generative AI models for design are limited by the conventional representations (i.e. stereotypes) of environments that they learn from their training data. They are often unable to respond to the diverse and subjective nature of design creativity. In many cases, outputs of prompt-based tools fail to capture the qualitative ‘essence’ of a design in the mind of a designer, even when presented with carefully crafted descriptive prompts.
“This project will help us tackle the hard problems of subjectivity in design and to develop tools with analogical reasoning capabilities. Such tools have the potential to understand and respond to subjectivity in ways that have not been possible so far.”