Design collective Panorámica has created a machine that utilises artificial intelligence and a set of prompts to generate unique pieces of furniture based on a repository of Mexican design styles during Mexico Ciy art week.
Showcased at the design section of the Zona Maco art fair in Mexico City, the exhibition was called Anybody Can Be a Mexican Designer with a subheading that disclaimed "even if you are not a designer nor Mexican".
The exhibition showcased the collective's machine inside a white booth backed by a massive screen.
Mexican collective Panorámica created the Anybody Can Be a Mexican Designer machine
The machine itself is a large, white wood-trimmed box with a small screen, a coin-insertion slot and a ticket printer. Panorámica said that the look of the machine itself was influenced by the minimalist modernism practised by the German Ulm School of design in the mid-20th century. After inserting a 10-peso coin ($0.59), users were guided through a sequence of prompts including typology, periods in Mexico's history ? from the Neolithic to the contemporary ? as well as variations in colour and degrees of decoration.
The machine has a reference bank with an archive of images drawn from a "wide spectrum of what we commonly imagine about design in Mexico," according to the collective. The software involved included a mix of Arduino, TouchDesigner and the OpenAI artificial intelligence application programming interface (AIAPI).
The form of the m...