The New York subway has grow to be an unlikely gallery of AI-era creativity.
There are panties that suppose. There’s a private harm lawyer driving an enormous pigeon over Manhattan. The photographs are absurd, arresting, and tough to disregard. Whether or not they symbolize sensible artistic considering or just AI-generated extra, they increase an uncomfortable query: when virtually something will be made to seem like one thing, what makes an concept value making?
For design researcher and inventive strategist Rhea Soman, this query goes past the novelty of AI-generated imagery. It touches on a extra elementary shift in how individuals create, work together with expertise, and assign which means to the issues they make.
A lot of Soman’s perspective comes from seven years working with Lumière Enterprise Options, a technology-forward analysis and consulting company. It was right here that she developed her understanding of the connection between design and analysis, working throughout disciplines to translate human insights into tangible concepts, experiences, and techniques. Her work concerned research-driven initiatives throughout industries, together with collaborations with world organizations akin to Unilever.
This expertise formed how she approaches artistic issues: not just by asking what one thing ought to feel and appear like, however by investigating the individuals, behaviours, and motivations that form it. For Soman, analysis is just not separate from the artistic course of. It’s what provides artistic selections their course and goal.
Her curiosity within the relationship between expertise and creativity additionally extends into her personal speculative design observe. In Echo & Eros, her speculative journal mission, Soman explored synthetic intelligence by the lens of magnificence, utilizing fictional manufacturers and imagined futures to query society’s rising obsession with manufacturing the perfect model of ourselves. Drawing on concepts explored in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, the mission thought of what occurs when representations cease merely reflecting actuality and start shaping it.
Generative AI makes that query newly tangible. It may possibly reproduce the visible language of virtually something, from luxurious promoting to creative experimentation. However when the looks of creativity turns into simple to breed, what distinguishes a picture that appears artistic from an concept meaning one thing?
Soman’s subsequent work with AI artistic platform Virse introduced her to a extra sensible model of the identical query: what occurs when expertise begins shaping the method of constructing issues?
After experimenting with instruments akin to Magnific, Adobe Firefly, and Replicate, she discovered herself transferring between platforms to develop concepts. Producing a picture was comparatively easy. Protecting monitor of the considering behind it was one other story.
Via analysis and inventive technique work with Virse, she started exploring how creatives perceive AI, the place their workflows break down, and what they want past the flexibility to generate.
Understanding the place expertise matches
One of many clearest themes rising from Soman’s analysis with Virse was the hole between what a product can do and the way individuals perceive it.
In a workshop designed to discover artistic workflows and perceptions of AI, members imagined potential purposes for the platform, however its position was not all the time instantly clear. The problem was not merely explaining options. It was serving to individuals perceive the place the product belonged inside the best way they already labored.
It’s a acquainted design downside: a platform can have spectacular capabilities, but when customers want a decoder ring to know its goal, the expertise has already created friction.
For Soman, that is the place design analysis turns into notably beneficial. It shifts the query from “What can we construct?” to “What do individuals want to know earlier than they will use it?”
Reasonably than main with AI terminology or an inventory of technical capabilities, the product wanted to speak a recognizable goal and show the way it might assist current artistic practices.
Protecting the human within the artistic course of
One other theme that surfaced was the anxiousness surrounding AI’s potential to interchange designers. But the conversations additionally revealed a counterpoint: creatives had been keen on utilizing AI to scale back friction, not give up authorship.
Designers make selections continually. They select instructions, reject alternate options, refine particulars, and acknowledge when one thing lastly feels proper. Inventive work will depend on judgment, and that judgment can’t be decreased to producing extra choices.
AI can speed up components of this course of, however pace is just not the identical as artistic freedom. Limitless variations are usually not notably helpful if somebody is left sorting by them with out getting nearer to a solution.
This distinction influenced Soman’s considering round Virse’s positioning. As a substitute of presenting AI because the artistic hero, the model wanted to speak a human-led partnership. Virse connects the work; the designer directs it.
The ambition was to not automate creativity out of existence, however to take away sufficient friction that folks have extra room to train it.
The issue with fragmented artistic workflows
Inventive work not often occurs in remoted steps. Concepts transfer between references, belongings, instruments, conversations, suggestions, and revisions. When these items grow to be scattered, context will get misplaced and momentum suffers.
Soman’s personal workflow mirrored this fragmentation. Every platform supplied one thing helpful, however transferring between them usually meant transferring recordsdata, reconstructing selections, and making an attempt to protect the considering behind an concept.
The Virse analysis explored ideas akin to iteration, refinement, collaboration, context, and progress. Collectively, these pointed towards a bigger alternative: supporting the journey of an concept fairly than merely producing its subsequent output.
Virse’s one-platform method responds to this fragmentation by bringing artistic context collectively. Its ambition is to assist individuals transfer from exploration to refinement with out repeatedly reconstructing the considering behind their work.
However Soman’s analysis additionally factors to an vital distinction: placing instruments in a single place doesn’t mechanically create continuity. A helpful platform should assist individuals protect intent, construct on earlier selections, and stay answerable for the artistic course of.
The actual profit is just not having extra instruments at one’s fingertips. It’s spending much less power managing them and extra power creating.
What analysis throughout industries can educate AI corporations about belief
An sudden connection emerged when Soman started deciphering the analysis by the lens of her earlier work in banking and healthcare.
Throughout these sectors, she had encountered recurring questions round belief, onboarding, loyalty, and retention. The industries had been completely different, however the underlying problem was acquainted: how do individuals be taught to make use of a product, what makes them assured in it, and what provides them a cause to return?
The identical questions apply to AI artistic instruments.
Curiosity is usually the straightforward half. A hanging outcome could make somebody fall in love with a software in minutes. However will they belief it with an actual mission, a consumer deadline, or an concept they’ve spent weeks growing?
Loyalty presents one other problem. The digital panorama is filled with merchandise individuals strive as soon as and abandon. For an AI software to earn an enduring place in somebody’s workflow, it wants to supply worth past the primary spectacular outcome.
These questions additionally knowledgeable Soman’s work on Virse’s model technique, visible identification, and communications. Her work explored other ways individuals may perceive the product, from an AI working system to a collaborative artistic workspace and an expert design companion.
The ensuing course emphasised shared context and the flexibility to scale artistic work with out changing human judgment.
The model wanted to make that promise tangible. Its identification communicates connection and motion, whereas its voice goals to be human, calm, and curious fairly than intimidating or crammed with expertise hype.
For Soman, branding on this context is just not merely about wanting distinctive. It’s about setting the fitting expectations for the expertise persons are about to have.
Past the immediate
Soman’s work with Virse reinforces a distinction on the heart of the present dialog about synthetic intelligence: producing one thing and creating one thing are usually not essentially the identical factor.
AI might make it simpler to provide virtually something. However serving to individuals perceive a software, protect their artistic judgment, carry concepts ahead, and construct confidence within the expertise requires a special type of design considering.
Her work means that the subsequent frontier of AI creativity will not be merely producing extra, and even producing higher. It might be about constructing instruments that assist concepts transfer ahead with out taking the human out of the method.
In any case, the objective was by no means to spend extra time switching tabs. It was to make one thing value making.
About Rhea Soman
Rhea Soman is a multidisciplinary designer, researcher, and inventive strategist primarily based in New York. With over eight years of business expertise, she has labored throughout expertise, shopper items, healthcare, and monetary providers. She spent seven years with Lumière Enterprise Options, a analysis and consulting company, exploring the intersection of human behaviour, expertise, and design by initiatives for world organizations. Her latest work consists of AI artistic platform Virse, the place she contributed to analysis, model technique, visible identification, and communications, in addition to SENA, a nonprofit centered on ladies’s security in New York Metropolis, the place she contributes to technique and design analysis. She holds a postgraduate diploma in Communication Design from Pratt Institute.
