Tag: iteration

The Keywork: Using AI for Insight, Not Replacement, in Creative Practice

The ethical use of artificial intelligence.

RJ Thompson
Associate Professor
University of Pittsburg

The rapid evolution of generative AI has reshaped professional practice in marketing, communications, and design, introducing both opportunities for efficiency and challenges of adaptation. While organizations increasingly adopt AI—55% already using it for marketing and communications according to Gartner—many professionals encounter decision and adaptation paralysis amid an overwhelming number of tools and pressures to “adapt or perish.” This presentation argues that the essential question is not whether AI can increase the quantity or incremental quality of creative work, but rather how it can sustain and expand human creativity in meaningful ways.

Our inquiry centers on divergent thinking as a method for transforming AI outputs into catalysts for original work. Techniques such as inverting AI-generated story beats, reframing prompts into yes/no pathways, and intentionally opposing machine-suggested structures create conditions for unique, non-homogenous outcomes. These approaches resist the creeping uniformity of AI-produced content, which risks reducing professional output to predictable patterns and disengaging audiences.

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To ground these concepts, we present The Keywork, a project conducted by the University of Pittsburgh’s Health Sciences Strategic Communications team. Leveraging ChatGPT for qualitative data analysis, the project processed five years of institutional content to identify brand pillars and generate insights that freed capacity for human-centered creativity. Here, AI served not as a replacement but as an amplifier—streamlining analysis so designers and communicators could focus on innovation, resonance, and impact.

Our findings suggest that the key to thriving with AI is to treat it as an interpretive and analytical partner, not a creative substitute. By adopting divergent thinking practices and positioning AI as a tool for inspiration and capacity optimization, creative professionals can ensure that their work remains unique, resonant, and enduring in an increasingly AI-saturated landscape.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.1: Virtual Online on Friday, November 14, 2025.

Mining for Ideas: Collaborative Collages as Spaces of Opportunity

A method founded in play and inspired by design history

Anna Jordan
Assistant Professor
Rochester Institute of Technology

I will present a method that I designed to help students and practicing designers come up with new and surprising ideas. The method, called “Mining for Ideas,” is grounded in collaboration and experimentation. It can be used in a classroom or design studio setting to effectively generate ideas about both form and concept. Designers begin with a collaborative collage game, involving an enormous selection of unconventional tools and materials, leading to spectacular sculptural creations. Each sculptural collage is altered by each designer, leading to truly collaborative pieces. Next, designers photograph the sculptures to create two-dimensional images that are mined for ideas, similar as to how a miner would chip away at earth to reveal valuable gems. Very quickly, designers generate many surprising ideas, each with corresponding examples of concrete design elements such as typography, grid, texture, color, and image. Then, the raw ideas are expanded into applied pieces of graphic design via a flexible morphology that is structured around these concrete design elements. The method is founded in play and inspired by design history precedent including my personal design practice, the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse drawing game, and Skolos-Wedell’s form-to-content method for designing posters. In this presentation, I will illustrate how the method works with several examples from my classroom, explain how the method could be applied to various design problems, and cite student interviews as evidence proving that the process is successful.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.