TY - CHAP

T1 - The Regenerative AI Practitioner: Thinking and Designing With AI More Sustainably

AU - Stead, Michael

PY - 2025/1/21

Y1 - 2025/1/21

N2 - Many designers wrestle with an internal, creative conflict. We consider ourselves authentic practitioners who have developed discrete tacit knowledge and skills which underpin how we practice our craft. Yet, many of us continue to serve a capitalist system that undermines our creative motivation and authorship. Our work is often reduced to a transient commodity that drives superfluous mass-production and consumption. Through our designs, we create carbon emissions, waste and deplete precious natural resources. Of the creative industries, Design and its designers arguably contribute most to the Earth’s growing climate crisis.Emergent AI tools are promoted as key enablers of a sustainable transition. However, like the technologies preceding it, the recent, rampant adoption of AI is also causing injurious environmental impacts, as well as disrupting notions of copyright and even jeopardising designers’ livelihoods. Given this tension, this chapter examines the psychical threats and promises AI poses for designers and their practice for engendering a sustainable future. Drawing upon practice-led research, the chapter argues that to transition beyond the factitious, generative and planetarily extractive AI that dominates today, designers must reflect upon and reorient how they engage with the medium. Adopting a Regenerative Design lens, the chapter rethinks how designers can manage their inner dissonance to develop a regenerative AI Design mindset. It contends this pedagogic-centred approach will help foster next-generation designers who can sustainably negotiate the post-human interdependencies – ecological (flora, fauna, planet) and technological (AI, data, devices) – that are creating existential challenges for the 21st century Design industry.

AB - Many designers wrestle with an internal, creative conflict. We consider ourselves authentic practitioners who have developed discrete tacit knowledge and skills which underpin how we practice our craft. Yet, many of us continue to serve a capitalist system that undermines our creative motivation and authorship. Our work is often reduced to a transient commodity that drives superfluous mass-production and consumption. Through our designs, we create carbon emissions, waste and deplete precious natural resources. Of the creative industries, Design and its designers arguably contribute most to the Earth’s growing climate crisis.Emergent AI tools are promoted as key enablers of a sustainable transition. However, like the technologies preceding it, the recent, rampant adoption of AI is also causing injurious environmental impacts, as well as disrupting notions of copyright and even jeopardising designers’ livelihoods. Given this tension, this chapter examines the psychical threats and promises AI poses for designers and their practice for engendering a sustainable future. Drawing upon practice-led research, the chapter argues that to transition beyond the factitious, generative and planetarily extractive AI that dominates today, designers must reflect upon and reorient how they engage with the medium. Adopting a Regenerative Design lens, the chapter rethinks how designers can manage their inner dissonance to develop a regenerative AI Design mindset. It contends this pedagogic-centred approach will help foster next-generation designers who can sustainably negotiate the post-human interdependencies – ecological (flora, fauna, planet) and technological (AI, data, devices) – that are creating existential challenges for the 21st century Design industry.

KW - Artificial Intelligence

KW - Regenerative Design

KW - Creative Industries

KW - Sustainable Futures

KW - More-than-Human Design

KW - Craft

KW - Authorship

KW - Pedagogy

KW - Post-humanism

M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)

BT - Artificial Intelligence In Creative Industries

A2 - Tigre Moura, Francisco

A2 - Moruzzi, Caterina

PB - Routledge

ER -