Fluency of Creative Ideas in the Digital Age

Research has explored the concept of originality in visual thinking and architectural education, using different methods. The new state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in architectural design represents another shift from traditional modes of architectural design and education, into a more authentic approach to the digital age. An experiment is designed to highlight the originality of this approach in design thinking and its futuristic trends and impact on education and creativity studies. The intent of the study we present here is twofold: one to revisit key design studies of design exploration and secondly to explore students' design activity while interacting with text-to-image diffusion machine learning (ML) generative models such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, as these might have the potential to change the way that architectural students approach the concept stages of designing projects and products. In addition, we are interested in how the new shift in interfaces and modes of stimulus will influence the students' design process and perceptions. Participants in the design process are final year students who had spent at least four years in a school of architecture and can be classified as semi-experienced designers. Further within the evaluation also lies a critique of the diffusion ML tools themselves as producers of architectonic images, rather than complete concepts for architecture that encapsulate spatial, formal, structural arrangements of elements.