Mapping Value
Publication Context: Cities and Love
Published as “Chapter 10 — Cities and Love: Generative Design as Mapping of Human Values” in the book, Future Cities—City Futures: Emerging Urban Perspectives by publisher TU Delft OPEN Publishing in 2023.
High-stakes decisions are not optimization problems with a single objective, but value-mapping problems across complex human tradeoffs. This published research establishes the theoretical framework underlying my work in generative AI.
The Myth of Hard Optimization
Generative design is often mischaracterized as a race toward hard optimization or a technocratic imposition on the design process. However, designing future environments—whether digital or physical—is a ‘wicked problem.’ Parameters and objectives are undefined, making it impossible to find a singular global optimum. Instead, it is a social project of mapping collective human values onto a computational space.
Sociotechnical Architecture
To project human vision rather than rigid parameters, generative AI must act as a sociotechnical platform. It requires computational frameworks that creatively overcome the division of intelligence between machines and humans, bridging top-down systemic vision with bottom-up ideation.
