Che-Wei Wang – When Design Gets Swallowed by Engineering
”AI is just another tool, but also not just another tool”
Che-Wei Wang runs a small design studio with his wife, where they explore computational and generative design. In their studio they have the tools to build prototypes in a single day. Working with CAD (computer-aided design) tools for many years, he has seen how these have always been meant to facilitate a human process. With the recent influx of AI in design however, generative design software has arrived big time. In many cases however, these tools are digital black boxes that often produce results that are surprising to the designers themselves. Showing examples of actual products he has created, Wang shows how human aesthetics and intuition often gets lost along the way. He argues that we should work to adapt AI software to accept human feedback, instead of reducing all kinds of inputs to numbers. Rather than going down the rabbit hole with automated design, we should really be looking at how things like CAD can become tools for human-aided design - especially now that we’re beginning to produce three-dimensional objects like furniture using generative design.
