Holding The Thread
Chenyue Li
Generative AI now runs in the background of everyday design work. A communication designer now switches tasks and juggles multiple projects while assets are generated. Returning to a project, they may have lost the place where they were in the task, and the thought process behind how options were being compared and why one was preferred. This project addresses judgement continuity in contemporary communication design. Holding the Thread asks what information and cues a designer needs to recover a task state and their thinking after switching away from an AI-assisted task. Research on task interruption, cognitive offloading, design evaluation and AI oversight led to four insights. AI keeps generating during the comparison process. Options outnumber what a designer can compare. Cross-tool workflows separate output from rationale. Parallel tasks fragment thinking. The outcome is a multimodal desktop system: physical project cards, a reader and a digital system that gives each project its own desktop. The AI works while the designer is away. On return, the system reports what changed, then restores the workspace.
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