Tacit Futures. Artificial Intelligence Mediating Designerly Ways of Knowing

Design practice confronts a critical tension: while creative capabilities have expanded dramatically, designers face growing responsibility to avoid unnecessary production in an oversaturated material world. This challenge requires reconceptualizing Design and Making beyond production activities, but as methods of inquiry, reflection, and civic engagement. Drawing from a designerly ways of knowing, this contribution examines how design knowledge emerges through iterative making processes rather than existing a priori, where solutions and problem understanding co-evolve. This empirical, tactile knowledge is inherently contextual, developing within specific environments such as artisanal workshops, factories, and more recently, collaborative spaces like makerspaces and Fab Labs. These environments function as relational infrastructures that democratize design capabilities while fostering collective agency, aligning individual creativity with shared challenges. Given the rapid integration of generative AI across design fields, this paper investigates how AI might amplify human capacities within makerspace contexts. Current AI applications in product design range from performance-driven geometry generation to AI-assisted ideation through image, video, and 3D generation tools. These developments have foreshadowed the emergence of completely new materialities enabled by digital fabrication. However, these applications reveal significant limitations: current probabilistic AI models lack a robust understanding of physical reality, often producing superficial or misleading results that require critical human interpretation. Through analysis of current AI capabilities and makerspace practices, we examine technical, cultural, and ethical challenges of AI integration, with particular attention to preserving and valorising the knowledge and the processes that define maker communities.