The Thought of the Hand in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Continuities, Transformations, and Irreducible Spaces of Drawing

Abstract

Francesca Fatta in conversation with Giancarlo Carnevale

Giancarlo Carnevale is a scholar and designer whose work has long explored the role of drawing within ideation and design processes. Situated at the intersection of representation, design theory, and the authorial dimension of the mark, his research foregrounds drawing not merely as a tool, but as a form of thought.

This conversation examines the evolving role of drawing in the age of artificial intelligence, distinguishing between representation—currently undergoing profound transformation—and drawing as prefiguration, an autograph and atemporal space of design thinking. While AI dramatically expands the capacity for variation and formal proliferation, it does not replace the critical act of judgment: selection, synthesis, and authorial responsibility. The discussion identifies a longstanding fracture between exhibited drawing and intimate drawing, the latter conceived as an auroral field of morphemes, figurative obsessions, and non-linear logics akin to Matte Blanco’s “symmetric thinking.” Immersive technologies, while redefining representation as experience, risk saturating the productive ambiguity essential to design. What emerges is a possible shift: from tools of definition to environments of exploration—immersive Wunderkammer in which designers curate constellations of possibilities. In a future shaped by the exponential multiplication of images, authorship will reside less in production than in the capacity to select, order, and withhold. Drawing-for-oneself—imperfect, slow, and accountable—may thus reassert itself as a critical anchor. Not because it is purer, but because it remains irreducibly human.

 DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.36.2026.aw1