Abhay Vohra and Mamta Gautam
Generative design research is a mode of inquiry in which participants become co-creators of knowledge by making artefacts that externalise their latent experience, values, and ways of seeing the system under study. This presentation argues that computation, grounded in embodied cognition and phenomenology, can extend this mode of inquiry into the construction of artefacts for participatory modelling and simulation of complex systems.
We develop this position through two engagements at the National Institute of Design, Haryana—an October 2025 Design Simulation course and an April 2026 workshop—in which students used a generative AI prompt architecture to construct parametric simulations of traditional craft practices. We reframe traditional craft as a system—of materials, embodied practices, rule-governed operations, and tacit constraints—and present a three-phase recursive framework refined across these engagements: Representation, Model and Simulation, and Reflection.
The framework aligns with the Framing, Sensemaking, and Reframing phases of systemic design at the scale of artefact construction, and is grounded theoretically in Peirce’s taxonomy of signs and Dourish’s account of embodied interaction: representations are iconic, models are symbolic, and simulations are indexical artefacts that couple action and meaning.
We present this framework as a pedagogical contribution, proposing Generative Design Research—computation as a structured material instrument for participatory, embodied inquiry into complex systems.
Keywords: generative design research, modelling and simulation, embodied cognition, abstraction hierarchy, semiotics, systemic design pedagogy