The Creative Direction With AI workshop, a unique opportunity to learn from the expertise of Ida Rasouli, an Iranian architect and the founder and creative director of Celeste Design Studio, was a transformative experience. Ida, a visionary in the concept development process in architecture, interiors, objects, and fashion, led the workshop, sharing her insights on the changes in the AI world and its influence on her work.

Emphasizing that marketing and fashion, the first creative industries to be affected by generative AI, offer designers unparalleled creative freedom to unleash their creativity. 

Ida then started her presentation by explaining what are AI Generative tools and how can they be leveraged in the creative process by designers to harness AI’s powerful capabilities of blending ideas to serve the human’s boundless exploratory creativity, Ida then ran our participants through the very basics of Midjourney explaining different settings and prompt optimizations that she personally uses to reach the best possible outcome. Explaining that curiosity and experimentation are essential in design, saying, “If you want to create unconventional works, you need to think in unconventional ways.”

Ida then ended Day 1 by checking the participants’ work for the assignments she had given them during the session, giving them her creative insight on how to enhance their work to reach their preferred results, making sure that she addressed and cleared out any questions participants had to get everyone ready for the more work demanding second session. 

The second session of Creative Direction with AI was about assignments and students’ work, implementing everything they learned from Day 1 into visual concepts. The second session started with Ida showcasing some of her projects, explaining what methods and prompts were used, what creative thinking direction enabled her to reach such results, and going over the essential rules to generate innovative yet functional spaces or designs. She then continued to check the participant’s previous assignments that were given to them at the end of Day 1, fixing their prompts and pointing out what could be altered to reach a better result guided by the curation techniques that she went over at the beginning of the session on how to choose the optimal result to generate further and optimize on.

Participants were given the last assignment of the session, blending their creative thoughts and developing new concepts based on each other’s designs. By the end of the workshop, participants could generate unique designs that were closer than they’d ever been to their creative vision!