Getting Lost Without Losing the Way

Design as a Practice of Conjunction Inside and Outside Artificial Worlds

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence technologies are redefining the processes of visual communication design, shortening production times and lowering the threshold of access to design tools. If the quality of a project does not depend on the precision of the prompt that generated it, but rather on its capacity to open up spaces of exploration, what remains of the designer's agency in the age of AI? This contribution addresses this question by drawing on the distinction, proposed by the philosopher Franco Berardi, between connection – a contact that optimizes signals without inhabiting the distance between producer and receiver – and conjunction, the framework of intentional acts within which alternative ways of thinking are generated. Generative AI presents itself as a technology of connection: it shortens the design process by eliminating the friction that has historically made design a form of embodied exploration. The article proposes a reading of visual design as a practice of conjunction: a space in which aesthetic experience generates unpredictable relations, disorientation, and the shared construction of meaning. The paper examines some pedagogical and design practices – from the exercises of Tenazas and Reinfurt to contemporary productions such as the BBC campaign Let's Make It Iconic and Donato Sansone's Concatenation 2 - Olympic Games – in which the resistance of materials and the suspension of immediacy prove to be fertile conditions rather than obstacles to be removed. These offer a productive lens through which to view the designer as a cultural nomad, capable of getting lost without losing themselves: pursuing opportunities for deviation and error, and welcoming unforeseen interpretations, without ever relinquishing critical direction. To validate this posture does not mean opposing one tool to another, but rather reaffirming design as a practice capable of inhabiting uncertainty and transforming it into transmissible knowledge: an agency that no automated system can assume in its place.