Conference Agenda

Generative AI (GenAI) has sparked intense media debate, yet design research has often echoed these narratives rather than examining how GenAI reshapes everyday design practices. This paper presents a year-long auto-ethnographic study involving 34 games and apps created through vibe coding, a GenAI-native approach that uses natural-language prompts to generate code. The study reveals distinct qualities that unsettle design processes: playful intervention, creative forgetting, spectral echoes, inventive excess, and fragile limits. Two key insights emerge: designing with GenAI requires deliberate engagement with cultural archetypes and treating AI as an unruly collaborator. Drawing on John Oswald’s 1985 concept of ‘plunderphonics’, the paper situates GenAI within a lineage of experimental art and design tactics. The paper offers auto-ethnographic insights into how GenAI reshapes design practice and introduces ‘Plundergeist’ as a critical and playful ethos for designing with GenAI through cultural plundering and unruly collaboration.