AI as a Design Medium - Harvard Design Magazine

Three examples of how LLMs can be creatively used to explore spaces and materials, rather than get to an answer the asked wants to hear.

If you treat AI as a tool, you ask: how do I get the right answer? If you treat it as a medium, you ask: what happens if I push this?

I’m curious to know how these projects worked with LLMs. If they used cloud offerings, like Gemini or Claude, could they replicate the same results using a local machine and a local model? I’m convinced that is the future: no data centers, no profit seeking enterprises or token maxing, just a curious seeker and a machine they can physically touch.

It shows that AI does not just produce outputs; it produces trajectories. And those trajectories have shape, drift, bias toward the familiar. That is material. We are spinning up whole systems, questioned and investigated and visualized.