/imagine prompt :
Perfectly Pretty Prompts
Through the evolution of a long series of Social platforms, we’ve seen a shifting emphasis on who rules these platforms. We’ve also gained some understanding of what skills are needed to best leverage their unique and peculiar strengths.
We began our journey into becoming a massively networked species with code based MOOs and early text-based messaging platforms like MSN messenger, ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger.
These early platforms celebrated the Textually proficient, and allowed users with superior language skills to rule those early roosts.
Stephen White wrote the first version of the MOO server, released on May 2nd, 1990. In fact early MOOs, and most early “Text-based adventure games” were the earliest form of text to imagination prompts on the Internet. Users engaged in elaborate text descriptions and long story arcs, using commonly defined game parameters with deeply involved, immersive roleplay.
Text created Worlds.
At 2.20AM on March 22,2006 Jack Dorsey set up the first ever Twttr account, and sent out the first ‘Tweet’ ever. Twttr was partly chosen because www.twitter.com had already been taken, and it sort of resembled the logic of Flickr. Twitter.com was eventually purchased. Dorsey said “...we came across the word "twitter", and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information", and "chirps from birds".
On July 16, 2010 CEO and co-founder Kevin System uploaded the first ever photo to the brand new Instagram app. It was a photo of his dog and his girlfriend’s foot.
Instagram created a new world of shared content for the visually inclined, and paved the way for sharing photography, art, illustration and the host of content that we see proliferating on the platform today.
With new platforms like MidJourney, the lines blur. With a more technical understanding of wordplay and textual articulation comes a host of different and variable imaging output. As we proceed down this winding new path, new tools and tricks emerge. New abbreviations and prompt agglomerators create a new class of hybrid man-machine creations.
As these tools take a firmer hold across Architecture and Design methodology, we will see a slew of support websites, keyword generators, tips and tricks to get better outcomes, and more nuanced and lucid prompt-making resources. We are slowly training a new man-machine hybrid, that will gradually outperform the furthest achievements of Human visualisation. And we are trained in return.
We are witnessing a remarkable alchemy between text and image, where the creation process and the visualisations it spawns intermingle in an intimate new dance. The results are decidedly alien, innovative, other-worldly and deeply unsettling. While the more we train these AIs, the closer they get to realistic output, slowly closing the loop. With more realistic output comes more realistic application.
With advances in text input and democratic toolkits being made available, the ivory towers of Architecture and Design will slowly start shedding bricks.
Pretty prompts create Powerful Portals.
are creating a new platform for an involvement without hierarchies in the creation of built artefacts and environments.
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Being able to take a ‘text’ brief and convert it to seductive imagery was the fig-leaf of most aesthetically driven Design practices.
In this emerging ecosystem, any abstract idea can find quick representation, permanently changing the dynamics of conversation with Design professionals.
Textual articulation is the domain of the general public. Democratic access to the tools of visualisation will redefine the boundaries of the profession profoundly.
When visualising abstract briefs becomes commonplace, what utility is left behind for the visualisers ? We will be forced to redefine parts of our process that accept the hallucinations of a machine as valid ‘input’. When visuals like these become currency in client interactions, we now share a visual frame, an abstract mood, a new emotive aspect to building spaces that come at us from other realms.
How we integrate Pretty Prompts into our design process may well shape the design output for the near future.