Design Imaginations

 

Conceptual impressions surrounding this post have yet to be substantiated, corroborated, confirmed or woven into a larger argument, context or network. Objective: To generate symbolic links between scientific discovery, design awareness and consciousness.

Design is a natural process. There is no need for rules or laws if you are cognizant of the strength of the components and their impact upon the whole. The final product will simply work and be found to be appropriate for the situation at hand.

All forms must function within their own constraints. A cat cannot be a dog, or a guitar a saxophone. However, the capacity to imagine allows us to freely create, synthesize and integrate these virtual formations in our mind. Our mind brokers the format in which creative thought and imagery can be considered and virtually realized.

Our imagination allows for free association and an appreciation for the symbolic power of design. In essence, our imagination harbors our subjective interpretation of consciousness and all that it may imply. Creativity requires a change in the underlying way in which you think. Creativity requires an altered point of view that is freely acceptable within the realm of the imagination without the fear of discrimination or judgment.

"Reason alone does not suffice."
Carl Jung
The Undiscovered Self (1958)

However, design consciousness requires much more than just a creative imagination, but also the desire and determination to see these imaginings made manifest and enter the world of relative form. Changing our thoughts through our imagination likewise changes how we feel about those thoughts and especially the forms that symbolize them. Design consciousness requires an active imagination and an open willingness to change.

How Imagination Fuels Empathy and Prosocial Behavior

Neuroscience / Source: McGill University by Kila DePape

Design consciousness is inherently altruistic in character and strives to be all-inclusive. All images have meaning, but not all images are as purposeful. Implying that the creative source from which these imaginings come forward seems to stem from the needs and desires of the heart more so than the mind.

* * *

(Almost) like us: Characterizing creativity in artificial intelligence. By Sophia Jahns, Max Planck Society, April 17, 2025 

 

Creativity is no longer exclusive to humans. Some forms of artificial intelligence are capable of producing poetry, entrepreneurial concepts, even visual art. Many people use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, which are trained on vast amounts of text, for co-creation: The artificial intelligence offers ideas and suggestions, while the human provides guidance, context, and direction. 

While researchers have examined the creative output of LLMs in recent years, the underlying process remains largely unexplored. This is why Surabhi S. Nath, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, set out to understand how creativity arises in LLMs and whether their creative process can be compared to the way the human mind finds ideas. The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server. 

Each large language model showed a clear preference for either a persistent or a flexible approach in each task but are less consistent than humans when comparing across different tasks. Moreover, the flexible LLMs produced more creative results compared to persistent LLMs, whereas in humans, both methods led to similar output. 

* * *

Why AI can’t understand a flower the way human do. By the Ohio State University, edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Regan. July 4, 2025 

"A large language model can't smell a rose, touch the petals of a daisy or walk through a field of wildflowers," said Qihui Xu, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in psychology at The Ohio State University. 

"Without those sensory and motor experiences, it can't truly represent what a flower is in all its richness. The same is true of some other human concepts." 

Overall, the LLMs did very well compared to humans in representing words that didn't have any connection to the senses and to motor actions. But when it came to words that have connections to things we see, taste or interact with using our body, that's where AI failed to capture human concepts. 

"They obtain what they know by consuming vast amounts of text—orders of magnitude larger than what a human is exposed to in their entire lifetimes—and still can't quite capture some concepts the way humans do," Xu said. 

"The human experience is far richer than words alone can hold." 

* * *

Toward a Multidisciplinary Understanding of Design Consciousness: The Interplay of Semiotics, Psychology, Physics, and Imagination 

Design can be understood not merely as a technical or aesthetic endeavor but as an emergent process grounded in the natural evolution of systems. It transcends prescriptive rules and codified laws when one becomes attuned to the intrinsic properties and interrelations of constituent elements. In this sense, design functions analogously to natural systems in physics, where local interactions give rise to emergent global patterns without centralized control (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). Cognizance of the structural strengths and systemic harmonics of design components enables outcomes that are not only functionally coherent but also contextually appropriate. 

All designed forms, like natural organisms, exist within ontological and material constraints. A cat cannot be a dog, nor can a guitar function as a saxophone. These constraints echo the principle of affordances in ecological psychology (Gibson, 1979), where each object suggests or limits particular uses by virtue of its form. However, while physical constraints govern real-world objects, the mind operates in a more plastic domain. Through imagination, we transcend fixed typologies and allow for the synthesis of hybrid, abstract, or symbolic constructs. These virtual forms, though immaterial, are central to the design process, as they are instantiated through cognition before they become externalized through material articulation. 

The imaginative mind operates as a symbolic processor—a semiotic system in itself—where signs, metaphors, and archetypes are combined, modified, or recontextualized. As Peircean semiotics asserts, meaning is not fixed but triadic: it arises in the interaction between a sign, its object, and its interpretant (Peirce, 1931–1958). This triadic process is central to design cognition, wherein a concept (interpretant) reshapes our perception of form (sign) in relation to its functional or aesthetic referent (object). Thus, imagination plays a dual role: it is both the source of ideation and the mechanism through which new design languages are formed and interpreted. 

Moreover, creativity is not merely the capacity to generate novel ideas but a restructuring of perception and cognition itself. Psychologically, this involves shifting from convergent to divergent thinking (Guilford, 1967), enabling a multiplicity of perspectives to coexist without immediate judgment. The creative process thus necessitates psychological openness (Feist, 1998), which fosters symbolic play, metaphorical recombination, and the suspension of logical constraints. In this internal theater, new forms are auditioned, synthesized, and tested before being actualized in the external world. 

Yet, imagination alone is insufficient for the full realization of design. What may be termed "design consciousness" integrates the intuitive and symbolic capacities of the imagination with intentionality and volition. This awareness aligns with Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) theory of flow, in which creativity is not only ideational but deeply processual, requiring focus, discipline, and a willingness to reshape the self in response to emerging insights. In this way, design becomes a transformative act—not just of matter, but of mind. 

From a physics perspective, the act of designing can be seen as a process of reducing entropy in a localized system by imposing structure and meaning—a kind of aesthetic negentropy. This notion parallels Schrödinger’s (1944) conception of life as that which feeds on negative entropy. In this framework, design is not merely decoration or utility—it is an existential assertion of order, coherence, and symbolically mediated purpose in an otherwise chaotic environment. 

To embody design consciousness is to accept the interplay of constraint and possibility, symbol and structure, emotion and form. It requires both the ability to imagine alternative realities and the determination to ground those visions within the fabric of reality. The transformation of imaginative constructs into physical or symbolic forms modifies not only the designed object but the designer’s own psychological and perceptual schema. Thus, to design is also to be redesigned. 

References 

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins. 

Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativty.  Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(4), 290–309. 

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin. 

Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill. 

Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vols. 1–8, C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, & A. W. Burks, Eds.). Harvard University Press.

Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. Bantam Books. 

Schrödinger, E. (1944). What is life? The physical aspect of the living cell. Cambridge University Press. 

The author generated this text in part with GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. Upon generating draft language, the author reviewed, edited, and revised the language to their own liking and takes ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.

* * *

"To believe is to accept another's truth.

To know is your own creation."

Anonymous

Edited: 11.29.2013, 10.16.2014, 01.11.2017, 02.27.2017, 07.01.2022, 12.03.2023, 06.09.2025, 07.03.2025

Find your truth. Know your mind. Follow your heart. Love eternal will not be denied. Discernment is an integral part of self-mastery. You may share this post as long as author, copyright and URL https://designconsciousness.blogspot.com/ is included as the resource and shared on a non-commercial no charge basis. Please note … posts are continually being edited over time. Copyright © 2008 C.G. Garant. All Rights Reserved. (Fair use notice). You are also invited to visit https://designmetaphysics.blogspot.com/, and https://sagariandesignnetwork.blogspot.com and https://www.pinterest.com