The DALL-E Invitational: We Asked Designers to Create Rooms, Objects, and Other Weird Experiments Using Image-Generating AI

With the sudden explosion into mainstream culture of AI tools like ChatGPT and the image-generation program DALL-E, the past few months have seen lots of speculation and big talk about what AI means for the future: Will machines take over the world? Will they take over the design industry? How scared should we be? These are questions that require serious consideration, but at the same time, we could hardly be blamed for simply being curious about what these tools can do, DALL-E in particular. DALL-E allows you to generate an endless stream of fictitious images based on whatever prompt you plug in, and it's insanely addictive; a few months back I went down a rabbit hole asking it to design rooms, to mash-up the work of famous designers and artists, or to create imaginary products from scratch; it was fun, so I invited a dozen designers to join me. You can see both my creations and theirs after the jump.
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Lauren Coleman Experiments with Gravity and Melting Metal in a New Skincare Campaign

Brooklyn photographer Lauren Coleman's love of science-lab equipment made her an obvious choice for an important collaboration we're debuting today: an artistic depiction of the properties of a new product by the Swiss beauty brand La Prairie, which since 1954 has been known for its scientific approach. La Prairie invited Sight Unseen to commission a series of animated cinemagrams to mark the launch, and we invited Coleman to conceptualize them.
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Want Sight Unseen to Review Your Work? Apply Now for 2018’s Reform Design Biennale

We receive submissions from designers every day in our inboxes, and we're constantly scouring platforms like Instagram and Pinterest for new work. But come next spring, we'll be looking to a new source for scouting designers: We've been asked to join the jury for a curated design exhibition known as REFORM, which takes place every other year in Copenhagen. The deadline for submissions is this Friday, December 1st.
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Ladies & Gentlemen and Robin Stein Team Up on a Still Life Inspired by Moholy-Nagy, Not Memphis

You know all those contemporary still-life clichés, like pastel backgrounds, cactuses, and Sottsass-approved geometric shapes? When New York photographer Robin Stein recently teamed up with Brooklyn design studio Ladies & Gentlemen for a studio visit (coming soon) and impromptu creative photo shoot (pictured after the jump), the longtime friends decided to toss all those ubiquitous tropes out the window and do something different.
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The Dogs of American Design + A Shinola Pet Giveaway

To celebrate the line of dog accessories Shinola has developed with Bruce Weber, we asked nine American designers we'd spotted Instagramming their canines alongside their creations (like Ben Medansky, above) what makes their dog a hero. See their best dog photos here, then post your own response on Instagram for the chance to win a Shinola leash, collar, rope toy, and postcard set worth $227.
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Views by Designer Tom Hancocks

In his new Views series created exclusively for Sight Unseen, New York designer Tom Hancocks used the 3-D graphics software Blender to conjure six different rooms inhabited by various types of chairs, whose forms and relationships to their immediate surroundings were intended to convey certain moods and emotions.
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Q+Q’s 2015 Collection, Shot by Amanda Ringstad

When we first invited one of our favorite prop stylists, Seattle's Amanda Ringstad, to create a shoot around Q+Q's line of waterproof, solar-powered watches last year, she attempted to abstract the simple, color-blocked designs into ambiguous shapes and arrangements. For its 2015 collection, however, the Japanese brand — who partnered with us for a second time at this year's Sight Unseen OFFSITE — went wild with pattern, so we thought it would be especially compelling to return to Ringstad once again and see how that might change her aesthetic approach. The result is a series of playful, summery images shot inside a big bucket of water that imagine the watches as eye-catchingly outfitted, anthropomorphized bathers.
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The Hollyhock House Shot by Gaea Woods

If you'd happened to wander into L.A.'s Barnsdall Art Park in the middle of the night last Friday, you might have assumed there were concert tickets, or some newfangled iPhone model, about to go on sale the next morning: even into the wee hours, a line of people three hours long snaked all around the property. Amazingly enough, though, the massive crowd had turned out not to buy something but to experience the re-opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark 1921 Hollyhock House, which we overheard certain over-caffeinated line-goers describe as "super hyped." Built in 1921 in the so-called California Romanza style, the theater and home turned museum had been closed to the public for more than three years for restoration, and the city was celebrating the unveiling of its face-lift by giving the public continuous free access for 24 hours. We figured the best way to mark the occasion was to send a photographer to shoot the house after dark, a task we entrusted to the up-and-coming L.A. photographer Gaea Woods.
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Sight Unseen Turns Five!

Perhaps the greatest joy of our 5-year tenure has been the amazing and fruitful relationships we've formed with our peers — all of the people who create, love, photograph, and write about design every day right along with us. These people clearly feel the same about us, seeing as when we invited them to help us celebrate by making us a fifth birthday card, we were overwhelmed by not only the quantity of responses but also by the thoughtfulness that went into each piece.
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Q+Q Watches Shot By Amanda Ringstad

When Amanda Ringstad showed a friend recently one of the images she'd styled and shot for us of a cluster of Q+Q SmileSolar watches, all linked together in a random shape, her friend's first reaction was: "That looks like a lawnmower!" Ringstad was thoroughly pleased — having been invited by us to apply her styling genius in the service of our friends at Q+Q, who partnered with us on this year's edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE, the Seattle photographer's main objective was to present the watches in a simple, abstracted way that left plenty of room for the imagination. "Watches are a simple thing, but difficult to disassociate so that they convey something else," she explains. After initial attempts to weave them together into a kind of "textile," or arrange them on top of summery backgrounds depicting water or sand, in the end Ringstad used spare colored planes and graphic shadows to elevate her subjects above the realm of mere utilitarian objects.
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