About the Cover

“To reflect this issue's theme of innovative co-designed approaches to bolstering urban resilience, the re:D team asked community members to share words that came to mind in thinking about an equitable urban future. The call came in the form of QR posters placed in university buildings during the Parsons Festival and yielded words that re:D's designer, Grace Hopkins, used to generate imagery, employing the text-to-image Al software programs Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, and DALL-E. The results ranged from fantastical to photorealistic, with verdant ("green" was a recurring term) futuristic cities the prevailing typology. Of the highly iterative process, Hopkins says, "As with any new technology, there are a lot of surprising outcomes from Al-some that inspire new creative approaches, and some that get quickly discarded." Hopkins organized hundreds of software-generated images by subject-depictions of buildings, nature imagery, and representations of people living in an urban future-for the cover. She was intrigued by the way the process, a combination of digital automation and skilled handwork, reversed the typical method of working with Al. "We think of technology's ability to organize content and humans' capacity to create, but in this case, my design resulted from culling and presenting from the output of generative software freed to create. I gained fresh insights by playing a new role in the process," says Hopkins-an approach encouraged at Parsons. (At right are thumbnails of Al images generated in the cover-design process.)”