When AI Answers Too Soon: The Displacement of Reflective Inquiry in Design
TL;DR
The paper situates this account within cognitive ergonomics through Rasmussen’s Skills-Rules-Knowledge taxonomy and Hollnagel’s efficiency-thoroughness trade-off, and proposes design principles for tools that keep the productive phases of inquiry intact.
Abstract
Generative AI tools in design are evaluated mainly by the quality and speed of their outputs. This paper argues that such evaluation overlooks what these tools do to the temporal structure of inquiry, and therefore to the designer engaged in it. Drawing on Schön’s account of reflective practice, Dewey’s theory of inquiry, and the phenomenology of skilled tool use, it proposes a three-phase model of AI-mediated inquiry and identifies where, in each phase, current tools tend to displace the reflective and developmental work of the practitioner. The cumulative mechanism is named reflective short-circuiting: the restructuring of inquiry so that the temporally extended moments through which designers constitute problems, dwell in uncertainty, and develop reflective judgment are shortened, pre-empted, or substituted. The paper situates this account within cognitive ergonomics through Rasmussen’s Skills-Rules-Knowledge taxonomy and Hollnagel’s efficiency-thoroughness trade-off, and proposes design principles for tools that keep the productive phases of inquiry intact.
