Collaborative Diffusion: Boosting Designerly Co-Creation with Generative AI

Visual communication in collaborative design provides common ground and a tangible trace of thoughts. Yet, it is often underused due to a lack of visualization skills and time needed to sketch and detail. Current visual co-creation tools can support this with existing images, whereas generative AI can produce entirely new images from textual prompts, allowing for highly specific, personalized results. In this paper, we explore how AI image generation can be used to enhance inspiration and communication throughout collaborative design. We introduce BrainFax, a tool that facilitates generating, editing, and sharing images with AI through a chat bot and online whiteboard. Through co-creation with designers in the field, we found that AI image generation can boost designerly co-creation, yet needs careful embedding into a workflow to leverage inspirational and communicative creations. We close with a critical perspective on the implications of this technology for design and discuss limitations and future work.