AI & Pinterest references

There’s a joke about how you spend years in architecture school designing things that already exist. It’s true. And it would be absurd to say there isn’t value in browsing references (but that’s a topic for a much longer discussion). That said, one of the most challenging things about studying at Polimi is the automatic use of Pinterest references and AI generated images.

The students here are bright and extremely motivated, but they’re overworked and stressed. If we imagine that architecture studies are some variation on a cycle of thinking and making, and at this school, because the greatest emphasis is on the final product, then thinking (and even a lot of making) becomes non-essential. Any shortcut that allows more and better output is superior to understanding, process, and experimentation. Design failure is wasted time. When one group of students are having their “product” evaluated directly in comparison to all other students, then not using shortcuts is inherently expensive in time and energy. It also pits students against each other in a bizarre technological war where they must use these resources to keep up but they must also contain and protect that information. Sharing information is strictly a disadvantage. As a result everyone is using different arrangements of the same tools, understanding less than they ever have (even in relation to how the tools might be used), and being incentivized to not help or teach anyone their process.

We’re at a very uniquely troubling place in the history of education, we’ve never had a tool arrive that we could truly outsource our thinking to, and here we are as students, all maniacally using it in parallel with “don’t ask don’t tell” policies just to survive the classes at the expense of so many opportunities to learn.