A report written by Enrico Rodriguez, Advanced Design Unit, Università di Bologna
This workshop, in collaboration between Rhode Island School of Design and the Advanced Design Unit at the University of Bologna, had the purpose of reflect about contemporary approches to design using AI Tools and its implicit cultural bias and mistakes encountered designing projects with a different cultural point of view. Sorted in teams of two people, each respectively from Prof. Cattabriga and Cardini’s classes, we were asked to exchange a brief involving service and/or product design with elements coming from our culture of belonging and develop them while experimenting and exploring a different culture with the afromentioned tools. This report has the purpose to document my journey from the brief to the final developed concept, including all the prompts used, feedbacks and thoughts. All report will be written in english, dialogues in ChatGPT are reported in italian as was the language used at that time.
Due to the fact that the purpose of the workshop was not to design “real” products and services, as to find theoretical and technical mistakes AI would done when translating languages and interpreting different cultures, uses of ChatGPT and Midjourney were the only allowed to develop our research, personas and final concept. I’ve accordingly decided to let the machine guide and automatically resolve as many tasks assigned, as if it were the only human involved in this project and I was only a mere spectator of its process.
This was done incorporating a series of tecniques and tips I’ve learned and practiced before and during the workshop, such as:
• exploit the knowledge of ChatGPT inside the conversation and, based on the information previously generated and given by me, automatize the introduction research and persona profile
• using ChatGPT to develop prompts for generating images with Midjourney
• re-uploading in Midjourney images exported from the same AI to generate variations coherent between each other
All the resulting processes had been documented in personal webpages linked to the principal websited dedicated to the workshop: not only the final results but all the trial-and-errors, mistakes, reflections, feedbacks and ideas, written in our native languages (with the exception of feedbacks from our mates, written in english)
We were allowed to use only ChatGPT and Midjourney as tools to develop our designs
As we were assigned in couples, my mate, Sherley, left this in my personal page:
“中秋节在中国是月圆团圆的节日，以此为灵感为现代中餐馆创造一个设计（例如桌椅、架子、室内装饰物、饮食相关器具等）。这个设计围绕家庭和团圆的主题，融合中国传统元素和现代室内风格，以促进中国家庭成员，尤其是祖孙间的隔代交流”
Due to the fact that I personally don’t know even a word in chinese, my first task assigned to ChatGPT would be to translate this in italian. I’ve tried from the start to role-playing with ChatGPT, as I was told to be effective with the quality of the result. Once obtaining a translation, I asked a follow-up question regarding the cultural context with some basic informations useful to begin development
Q: Sei un traduttore ed interprete specializzato in cinese ed italiano, sei stato incaricato di tradurre questo brief di progetto dal cinese per un designer italiano: