Products of Place is SPACE10 project in collaboration with oio Studio. It is an exploration across future design processes, experimenting with artificial intelligence to create more sustainable products using unexpected material abundance in different locations across the world. 

Products today are not the ‘products’ of the place they are used, but rather the result of global industrialisation practices. This is the opposite of ‘products’ of nature, which instead naturally emerge from their complex local ecosystems. This project hands over the design process to AI, asking it to generate speculative products from a set of local variables. 

These generations aren’t perfect. Products of Place highlights the weaknesses of AI platforms as well as their strengths. Some of the generations are wonky, factually incorrect, or visually unappealing, while others are striking fuel for the imagination. No matter the scenario, a level of human curation is still required to decide which concepts are good and could potentially move into development. 

In an age of post-human intelligences, the project prompts us to examine how AI might reinstill design with the kind of intentionality, criticality and integrity that a time of emergency requires. And how these evolving intelligences could radically change the way we design together in the future.