Arts of Living with Machines

Johan Redström

This paper offers a perspective on how design can respond to AI by framing current challenges within the broader historical context of design responses to machines. Tracing recurring tensions between technological advances and human agency in early Swedish industrial design, it explores the central role of “useful” things and tools in how design has historically addressed machine autonomy. Arguing that this aesthetic and conceptual foundation has reached its limits, the paper identifies new directions for design in relation to generative technologies and distributed agencies.