Editorial: Language in design
Abstract
The role of language is central to the practice of designing, though our understanding of this role has evolved from more formal-language representations to more natural-language representations. Language plays a central and critical role in all aspects of design including: collaboration, problem understanding and framing, modelling, decision-making, creativity, and marketing. With textual data relating to design widely available, and recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), we are poised at an interesting stage in our understanding of the role of language in designing. The last few years have seen what is being called a Cambrian Explosion in large language models (LLMs) that effectively represent human language and to all appearances, human knowledge and reasoning as well. Subsequent deployment of AI applications have thrown into sharp relief questions regarding the role of language in the exploration and representation of knowledge in general; questions that will have a large impact on how we go about designing. This theme track re-examines the role of language in designing, asking questions about how the latest developments in technology will change practices of language use in general and conversation in particular in design processes. We invite contributions that focus fundamentally and empirically on analysing language as a way to understand designing and design education in all forms, whether through ‘conventional’ conversation, or through AI-mediated…
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