The Cyborg Designer

Designers perform phenomenally well in tasks that involve creativity and insight - tasks that are typically unfeasible for design algorithms. However, design algorithms excel at tasks that are tedious and time-consuming for human designers, such as searching graphs, accessing and parsing large amounts of information, and optimizing mathematical functions. This complementary relationship is typically exploited by providing designers with computational tools that can be accessed at will. However, designers tend to become “set in their ways”, relying heavily on previous solutions and well-known methods. This is especially true of expert designers and can hinder the adoption of new computational tools, leading to potentially non-optimal solutions.