City Research Online

Abstract

The advent of generative AI (GenAI) threatens professionals’ identities with unparalleled disruption and instability. Previously immune to change brought by incumbent digital technologies, professionals must contend with GenAI’s equivocal and ubiquitous nature. Our research draws on the accounts of fifty-six professional designers sampled for the direct impact of GenAI on their profession. We establish the paradigm of designers’ professional identity, and observe GenAI fracture their locus of problem-solving. A break that challenges designers’ creative expertise, dilutes their distinctiveness, and competes with their problem-solving capability. This fracture alters the attachment designers ascribe to their creative output when it comes from GenAI. We contribute to the identity landscape by suggesting that extant identity coping mechanisms do not accommodate the equivocal and ubiquitous nature of GenAI. The instability and disruption to designers’ professional identity brought by GenAI illuminate the unique tensions and blurred behaviours of designers in a state of epistemic flux.

Publication Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information:	This paper has been presented at 40th EGOS Colloquium, University of Milano Bicocca. Do not publish, redistribute or use without the authors' permission.
Publisher Keywords:	professional identity, generative AI, designers, threat response, epistemic flux, proximity of expertise
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General)
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads