An Intent of Collaboration: On Agencies between Designers and Emerging (Intelligent) Technologies

Design is a non-linear, reflective process in which practitioners engage with visual, semantic, and other expressive materials to explore, iterate, and refine ideas. As Generative AI (GenAI) becomes integrated into professional design practice, traditional interaction approaches focusing on prompts or whole-image manipulation can misalign AI output with designers' intent, forcing visual thinkers into verbal reasoning or post-hoc adjustments. We present three interaction approaches from DesignPrompt, FusAIn, and DesignTrace that distribute control across intent, input, and process, enabling designers to guide AI alignment at different stages of interaction. We further argue that alignment is a dynamic negotiation, with AI adopting proactive or reactive roles according to designers' instrumental and inspirational needs and the creative stage.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into design and development workflows, yet decisions about their use are rarely binary or purely technical. We report findings from a constructivist grounded theory study based on interviews with 33 designers and developers across three large technology organisations. Rather than evaluating LLMs solely by capability, participants reasoned about the role an LLM could occupy within a workflow and how that role would interact with existing structures of responsibility and organisational accountability. When LLMs were framed as tools under clear human control, their use was typically acceptable and could be integrated within existing governance structures. When framed as teammates with shared or ambiguous agency, practitioners expressed hesitation, particularly when responsibility for outcomes could not be clearly justified. At the same time, participants also described productive teammate configurations in which LLMs supported collaborative reasoning while remaining embedded within explicit oversight structures. We identify tool and teammate framings as recurring ways in which designers and developers position LLMs relative to human work and present an analytic rubric describing how role framing shapes decision authority, accountability ownership, oversight strategies, and organisational acceptability. By foregrounding design-time reasoning, this work reframes To LLM or Not to LLM as a sociotechnical positioning problem that emerges during system design rather than during post-deployment evaluation.

AI agents that generate final answers based on user input often do not meet the needs of creative fields. Fields such as structural design and architecture need interactive systems that help users externalise and develop ideas, explore alternatives, and refine partial solutions. The final product of such designs needs to comply with many constraints concerning, e.g., spatial configuration, mechanical behaviour, material quantities, and costs. These constraints create friction in the design process, which can stimulate novel and creative solutions. In this paper, we discuss the misalignment between current generative AI goals to remove friction and provide final solutions and the needs of creators, such as structural designers, who develop ideas through iterative work. We present the design dimensions of systems allowing for constrained human-AI co-creation that rely on vision-language models making structural exploration conversational, multimodal, and responsive to evolving human intent in ways that follow and augment the discipline's creative process. Through a pilot design interface based on these principles and a study with experts in the field, this paper shows how structural designers perceive interactive AI systems and how such systems can support design space exploration by reducing repetitive modelling friction while preserving reflective design friction.