Month: October 2026

Keep the tension: designing with generative AI

Slides from my keynote at the CLICKNL Design Innovation Sessions, Digital Futures theme session, Dutch Design Week, 21 October 2026, Natlab, Eindhoven.

CLICKNL invited me to give this keynote. I saw it as a great opportunity to intervene in the debate about design and generative AI. My take is informed by my past work on contestability. That work is all about approaching “AI” as an arena where various parties compete over how it is made and how it is used. My take is also informed by my commitments to practice theory and political realism. Practice theory means looking at what people and things do together, rather than at technologies in isolation. Political realism means looking at politics as it actually happens. It asks who does what to whom, for whose benefit, instead of starting from abstract moral principles.

In the talk I argue that neither wholesale rejection nor uncritical embrace of generative AI will get us very far. GenAI deskills designers and opens up new ways of designing at the same time. It is built on the past work of designers, which raises the question of whose work we build on, and who gets to call the results their own. And it automates work, but in the process work may get delegated more than replaced, transforming practices as a result. Rather than trying to resolve these tensions, I look for emerging design practices that hold them and use them as an engine for moving forward. I discuss three cases: Vera van der Burg’s Text-to-Clay, Blaze Type’s test of Monotype’s AI type tool, and The Call by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. They all go beyond consuming off-the-shelf models. They treat pipelines and workflows as an object of design. And in all three there is an awareness of the value of effort and friction. I end with an open question. If AI is not one thing, not an agent, and neither our savior nor our doom, what metaphor does your mind go to?

I hope this talk helps designers think in concrete terms about how we might “do AI” differently from the dominant ways. And I hope it helps them break free from the simplistic for-or-against debates that get us nowhere.

CLICKNL DDW 2026 DIS Digital Futures keynote slides – Kars Alfrink – Keep the tensionDownload

Works discussed

Studio Dumbar

From Text-to-Clay, Vera van der Burg

Blaze Type and Monotype’s AI type tool

The Call, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst

CRTA visual identity, Bruketa&Žinić&Grey

Mud to Models and Soil to Servers workshops

  • Fieke Jansen, Sunjoo Lee, Kars Alfrink and Lena Trotereau, From Mud to Models: Regenerative Futures for Community AI (conference workshop), TH/NGS 2025, Amsterdam, 12 Dec 2025, and From Soil to Servers: Regenerative Futures for Community Computing (workshop), Creative Coding Utrecht, Utrecht, 27 Mar 2026; Kars Alfrink and Sunjoo Lee, with Advaita Jairam, From Soil to Servers: Pairing Material Practice with Speculative Design to Rethink Computing Infrastructure (conference workshop), Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations Conference (PHTR 2026), The Hague, 22 Sep 2026.
  • TU Delft, “From Mud to Models: A Workshop on Regenerative AI Futures”, 17 Dec 2025. https://www.tudelft.nl/2025/io/december/from-mud-to-models-a-workshop-on-regenerative-ai-futures
  • Kars Alfrink, Sunjoo Lee, Lena Trotereau and Fieke Jansen, “Mud and models: Does making matter for regenerative AI speculation?”, in Iskander Smit and Andrea Krajewski (eds.), The State of Responsible Technology – RESIZE<REMIX<REGEN (RIOT 2026), Stichting ThingsCon Amsterdam, June 2026, pp. 34–39. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20569440

Further reading

  • Alfrink, K. (2025). People’s compute: Design and the politics of AI infrastructures. OSF. https://doi.org/10/q8kp
  • Caplan, L. (2025). Introduction: Contesting models – art and democracy since the 1990s. In L. Caplan & K. Greaves (Eds.), Model collapse: European contemporary art in a time of democratic crisis (pp. 1–20). Manchester University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.36233585.6
  • Geuss, R. (2008). Philosophy and real politics. Princeton University Press.
  • Kuutti, K., & Bannon, L. J. (2014). The turn to practice in HCI: Towards a research agenda. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3543–3552). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557111
  • Löwgren, J., & Stolterman, E. (2004). Thoughtful interaction design: A design perspective on information technology. MIT Press.
  • McGowan, T. (2016). Capitalism and desire: The psychic cost of free markets. Columbia University Press.
  • McGowan, T. (2019). Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a contradictory revolution. Columbia University Press.
  • Morozov, E. (2024, August). AI and the techno-utopian path not taken. Le Monde diplomatique (English edition). https://mondediplo.com/2024/08/07ai-cold-war
  • Parsons, P. C. (2026). Myths and ironies of AI-assisted design. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’26) (pp. 523–535). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813086
  • Porfirio, D., McDermott, I., Chen, H.-M., Satake, S., Kanda, T., & LaToza, T. D. (2026). Designing for robot wranglers: A synthesis of literature and practice. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’26) (pp. 4284–4298). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813070
  • Retkowsky, J., Hafermalz, E., & Huysman, M. (2026). Harnessing a “spirited technology”: How working with generative AI collapses the creative process. Academy of Management Discoveries, 12(3), 363–387. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2024.0280
  • Retkowsky, J., Hafermalz, E., Huysman, M., & Odijk, D. (2026, September 16). Research: Gen AI is collapsing creative processes. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/09/research-gen-ai-is-collapsing-creative-processes
  • Salvaggio, E. (2026, August 16). The system from nowhere. Cybernetic Forests. https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/the-system-from-nowhere/
  • Sayers, S. (2011). Alienation as a critical concept. International Critical Thought, 1(3), 287–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2011.609265
  • Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y., Gal, Y., Papernot, N., & Anderson, R. (2024). The curse of recursion: Training on generated data makes models forget. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493
  • Stilgoe, J., Owen, R., & Macnaghten, P. (2013). Developing a framework for responsible innovation. Research Policy, 42(9), 1568–1580. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733313000930
  • Suchman, L. (2023). The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI. Big Data & Society, 10(2), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794
  • Unger, G., & Narayanan, A. (2026, October 14). Steering AI beyond automation: A research agenda and plan for action. AI as Normal Technology. https://www.normaltech.ai/p/steering-ai-beyond-automation
  • van Maanen, G. (2022). AI ethics, ethics washing, and the need to politicize data ethics. Digital Society, 1(2), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44206-022-00013-3
  • Wright, E. O. (2010). Envisioning real utopias. Verso.