Artificial Intelligence is ushering in a new era of design culture, redefining the traditional pursuit of harmonizing form and function. Historically, design has been constrained by structural necessities and usability requirements, negotiating aesthetics with functionality. However, as AI promises to liberate function from its physical embodiment, aesthetics itself becomes a new kind of function. Design evolves into “functional art,” drifting away from the historical concept of “applied art” that originally paved the way for the later rise of design as a discipline. This evolution is so profound that the very disciplinary status of design may need to be radically rethought.
This paper explores the shift from functional design to functional art, where the aesthetic definition of the designed object, freed from traditional functional constraints, acquires a new cultural mission — one that, following Arthur C. Clarke’s principle that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” also reclaims to retrieve the ancestral, mystical relationship between humans and their environment. AI may mark the end of the first history of design and inaugurate its second history, where function and aesthetics merge into an immaterial yet “dense” (simultaneously aesthetic and functional) experience.
This transition calls for moving beyond a product-centered design culture toward an era of ‘living’ objects, endowed with AI-driven, magic-like capabilities, thus reminiscent of ancient magical metaphors that once helped humans navigate a seemingly supernatural world. Whereas design once managed objects’ bodies, it must now manage their souls.

Authors:
Stefano Caggiano, Istituto Marangoni, Italy

About the Presenter(s)
Stefano Caggiano is a full-time faculty member at Istituto Marangoni, Italy. His research focuses on two areas: The intersection between design languages and technologies; New educational methods aligned with the cognitive needs of digital natives.

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