Designing with Generative AI: Symbiosis, Authorship, and the Evolving Image

Abstract

This article explores how generative AI reshapes authorship, presence, and meaning in design. To situate this shift, it compares today’s disruption with photography’s nineteenth-century challenge to painting, when automation displaced documentation and creativity shifted toward perception and subjectivity. A similar redistribution occurs today: as generative systems automate craft, creativity is reconfigured toward prompting, iteration, and negotiation. The article advances three conceptual contributions. First, the symbiosis–agency–meaning-making triangle offers a heuristic for analyzing how authorship unfolds in human–system interaction. Second, the concept of interactional literacy names the competences required to navigate co-adaptive AI systems, extending debates on design and AI literacy toward practices of negotiation and reflection. Third, aura is reframed through three models—prompt aura, interactional aura, and algorithmic signature—translating Walter Benjamin’s contested concept into design-relevant dimensions and showing how presence emerges as resonance layered across prompts, processes, and system tendencies. Together, these frameworks highlight that authorship is redistributed through negotiation and response; that aura is reconfigured as a relational presence built across iterative layers; and that literacy emerges not as mastery but as dialogue. For design research, the task is to develop systems, practices, and pedagogies that sustain authorship as accountable, plural, and open to critique in the age of generative AI.