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Analysing Designer-GenAI Interactions

Ranscombe, C., Tan, L. & Gospill, J. 2025. Analysing designer-GenAI interactions: characterizing designers’ behaviours during inspiration and ideation. in Proceedings of the Design Society, Vol. 5, pp561-570. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2025.10070

Details

Text-to-Image Generative AI (GenAI) platforms offer designers new opportunities for inspirationseeking and concept generation, marking a significant shift from traditional visualisation approaches like sketching. This study investigates how designers work with text-to-image GenAI during inspiration-seeking and ideation, aiming to characterise designers’ behaviours through designer-GenAI interaction data. Analysis of 503 prompts by four designers engaging in a GenAI supported design task identifies two distinct behaviours: exploratory, characterised by short, diverse prompts with low similarity; and narrowing, characterised by longer, high-similarity prompts used with detail focused variation functions. The findings highlight the value of GenAI interaction data to reveal patterns in designers’ behaviours, offering insights into how these tools support designers and inform best practices.

keywords: artificial intelligence; industrial design; conceptual design; generative AI; prompt analysis