The rapid integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is fundamentally disrupting digital design,
shifting the practitioner’s role toward an augmented designer while threatening
human creative agency. If unreflectively integrated, GenAI risks automating the
ideation phase, thereby flattening critical cultural nuances. This
Research-through-Design (RtD) inquiry investigates how design researchers
can meaningfully navigate designer-AI interactions within design futuring
without surrendering curatorial control.
Utilising the professionalisation of Brøndby Women’s football club as an
empirical case study, this research addresses the wicked problem of reconciling
the club's working-class Vestegnen heritage with emerging lifestyle branding
aspirations. Through a partial application of Ethnographic Experiential Futures
(EXF), qualitative fieldwork was analysed via Reflexive Thematic Analysis to
generate strict ethnographic constraints. By relegating GenAI exclusively to the
prototyping phase via digital bricolage, ten hyper-realistic communicative
artefacts were produced. These artefacts were deployed into the field as
breaching experiments to deliberately disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions
and provoke strategic reflection among stakeholders.
The findings demonstrate that human-authored ethnographic prompts
successfully insulate speculative artefacts from algorithmic homogenisation.
Furthermore, the hyper-realistic visual fidelity of the AI-generated materials
functioned as a necessary perceptual bridge, suspending speculative ambiguity
and enabling critical stakeholder dialogue. Ultimately, this thesis contributes a
high-control methodological framework for designer-AI collaboration, arguing
that the modern digital designer must act as an algorithmic curator where the AI
constructs the medium, but human ethnographic inquiry explicitly provides the
message.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.15012.44162
Publication Date: 2026-06-14