Evaluating Human-AI Design Interaction from the Perspective of Cognitive Abstraction

Together abstraction and iteration are two foundational cognitive processes used by designers to expand intellectual experimentation, realize innovation, and construct theoretical positions and formulate generic models. Nersessian’s work on conceptual change highlights abstraction and the role of non-specificity in the formation of generic models, understood to be mental abstractions of a system or relationships seen in objects and dynamic processes. (Nersessian, 2005) we analyze the way small groups of designer structure data inputs for AI tools vizcom and Midjourney to rapidly materialize futuristic visualizations. The construct of consistency is used to evaluate the designers creative process utilizing AI tools and examine future applications, scenarios, design strategies, solutions, and futuristic product feasibility. The aim of this study is to identify degrees of interface abstraction in prompt inputs and AI visualization outputs that may indicate the formation of generic models characterized by non-specificity, understood here as abstraction of a design intent. The ubiquity of iteration in design projects also highlights its importance in the design process. A second aspect of this study is the way designers decompose, integrate or revise semantic structures of prompts for Human-AI integrated workflows to improve design visualization outcomes. Human-artificial intelligence (AI) visualization outputs are aligned to prompts and sketches, and examined to identify levels of non-specificity (expression of abstraction) using the domain constructs of spatial structure, social quality, and spatial quality, to indicate the possible present of a generic representational model. Nersessian, Nancy. 2005. Abstraction via generic modeling in concept formation in science, in Martin R Jones, Nancy Cartwright, Idealization XII Correcting the model: Idealization and abstraction in the sciences. Pozanan’ Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities, Vol. 86. Amsterdam Brill.