IS HIGH SKETCHING PROFICIENCY STILL AN ADVANTAGE? EXPLORING THE ROLE OF FREEHAND DRAWING IN VEHICLE DESIGN WITHIN THE 2D GENERATIVE AI LANDSCAPE

Industry 5.0 is disrupting industrial design and forcing it to rethink its methodologies and workflows from ideation to conceptualisation, design, development and production. Because of this new Industrial Revolution stage, leading thinkers say that designers need once more to adapt or disappear by transitioning from using technology as a tool to collaborating with it since technology has become intelligent. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and its applications (e.g., Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Vizcom) put the role of industrial designers under review, from designer-makers to designer-curators. Today, GenAI can make countless instantaneous images. Before, it took many hours to produce each one. Industrial design fields that rely on freehand representation, such as product and transportation design, stand to be most disrupted. The authors partnered with a leading GenAI company to explore if high proficiency in two-dimensional (2D) sketching and rendering still constitutes an advantage in transportation design. A mini-mobility challenge was proposed. The participants were divided into two groups: untrained students and trained experts with transportation design sketching and rendering skills. Participants used auto-ethnography to record their journey and reflect on their experience and process. An expert panel compared the results and evaluated the proficiency of 2D freehand sketches against alternatives provided by GenAI intervention. The researchers and experts observed tipping points for the changes in roles of designer-makers to designer-curators who also oversee and collaborate with artificial intelligence. Research outcomes offer recommendations of good practices for GenAI use and ways to update design education curricula to equip future professionals in the field.