Contact
Welcome to my homepage ;) Now that social media is broken, a relapse into the previous medium.
mail (at) florianalexanderschmidt.de
Not on social media.
Design Theory, History and the Present
Since 2006 I have been researching what digital tools, platforms and, most recently, generative AI do to the work of designing: who builds these systems, who works inside them, on whose terms. From Tools for Empowerment to Platform Capitalism. At the same time I am convinced that the new tools can only be understood by those who try them out. Structural critique and hands-on appropriation therefore go together.
since 2026
Agentic Design
At the moment I am exploring how AI tools can be used to build rule-based design systems that generate complex forms, such as learning games, algorithmically from databases. For now the learning happens more in the building than in the didactic quality of the games.
This website was made the same way.
- 2026work in progress …
2022–2026
Image Machines
From late 2022 onwards ChatGPT made generative AI a subject for many people, because one no longer merely read or heard about “AI” but could try it out oneself. For the design world that moment came half a year earlier, with the image generator DALL·E 2. In response, together with Sebastian Schmieg and students at HTW Dresden, the Prompt Battle came about: a public format in which prompting itself becomes observable; the game as a Trojan horse for questions about the origin of training data, the carbon footprint of the models and the future role of authorship and creative work. A family of formats grew out of it: the Slop Night, an evening for one's own most bizarre AI failures, and Deep Fried Design, the Faculty of Design's AI week, for reflecting on and appropriating these tools together.
- 2023Screen Walk with The Prompt Battle Team
Video, Screen Walks series (The Photographers’ Gallery / Fotomuseum Winterthur) · Video - 2023/imagine an overheated debate:: #AIart, trending on Twitter, 4K render
Talk, transmediale, Akademie der Künste Berlin · Video - 2025Deep Fried Design: the Faculty of Design's AI week
Projekt · fakultaet-design.de - Dazu Vorträge und Formate ohne Aufzeichnung
among them The Art of Neuroscience (Amsterdam 2023), Everyday AI (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar 2023)
2018–2022
The Work Behind AI
Machines can see today because people painstakingly trained them to. Teaching the vehicles of the German car industry to see took the judgement of hundreds of thousands of clickworkers, well out of sight. Commissioned by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, from 2018 I examined the global outsourcing supply chains for training data and was able to show for the first time that much of this work was then being done in Venezuela, documenting in interviews the situation of the people who form the human layer of the AI machinery. This strand of research led to a chapter in Digital Work in the Planetary Market (MIT Press), alongside essays on the invisible labour behind the interfaces: home work, content moderation.
- 2022The Planetary Stacking Order of Multilayered Crowd-AI Systems
Book chapter, MIT Press, „Digital Work in the Planetary Market“ · PDF (open access) - 2021Unheimliche Heimarbeit
Conversation with Sebastian Schmieg, published as Uncanny Home Working
in: (How) do we (want to) work […], eds. Jesko Fezer & Studio, Claudia Banz, Sternberg Press, 2021 · PDF - 2020Study Commission on Artificial Intelligence
Expert witness, Deutscher Bundestag - 2020Unevenly Distributed
Essay, The Photographers’ Gallery, „A Cat, a Dog, a Microwave“ · Druck 2023 · web version - 2019Crowdproduktion von Trainingsdaten
Study, Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, Study № 417 · PDF
English short version: Crowdsourced Production of AI Training Data · PDF
2016–2018
Platform Economy
These are the years in which it becomes clear that supposedly placeless platforms pose very concrete challenges to cities, to local labour markets, to national employment law and to union work built around standard employment. And that regulation requires precise mapping first. My 2016 study for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung proposes a classification of platform labour and leads me into policy advice for several years. An English edition, updated in substance, follows, as does a study of location-bound gig work for the Berlin Senate administration. What began as a design question has become a labour-policy one; the audience is no longer only designers.
- 2017Digital Labour Markets in the Platform Economy
Study, FES · English edition, updated in substance · Spanish 2021 · PDF - 2017Der Job als Gig with Ute Kathmann
Report for the Berlin Senate administration, ArbeitGestalten · PDF - 2016Arbeitsmärkte in der Plattformökonomie
Study, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung · a classification of cloud and gig work · PDF - 2015Expert witness, public hearing on digital labour
Digital Agenda Committee, German Bundestag · Statement (PDF) · Session
2015–2017
Design Journalism
From 2015 to 2017 agenda design appears twice a year, commissioned by the Allianz deutscher Designer: five issues under my editorship, designed by Jan-Hendrik Schmidt (Buntesamt). Each issue is devoted to a single theme that shapes content and design alike: visibility, borders, identity, experiment, drive. Contributions come from design, research and journalism, among others by Harald Welzer, Annette Geiger, Holm Friebe and Elvia Wilk. The issues are published individually and together in a slipcase. Alongside this, texts for form, designreport and t3n.
- 2017Formen der Autonomie
Lead essay, agenda design № 5 „Antrieb“ · PDF - 2017Speculative Design
Lead essay, agenda design № 4 · PDF - 2016Einzigartigkeit am Fließband
Lead essay, agenda design № 3 · PDF - 2016#Neuland
Lead essay, agenda design № 2 · PDF - 2015Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst
Lead essay, agenda design № 1 · PDF - Further contributions and conversations
- 2015–18Interviews
Gernot Böhme (designreport 2/2018) · Kickstarter and Lofelt (designreport 5/2017) · Jaron Lanier (t3n № 45) · Raúl Rojas (t3n № 46, 2016) - 2013Die Revolution wird nicht 3D gedruckt
Conference paper, DGTF “Politik der Maker”, Hamburg · PDF - 2012Schwarm / Hive
bauhaus magazin № 3, German and English · PDF
2011–2017
Crowd Design
From 2011, in my doctoral work at the Royal College of Art, I examined how competition platforms for creative work came about. The pivot is Silicon Valley's founding contradiction: celebrating the individual empowered by tools while at the same time treating the many as a crowd whose labour is there to be tapped. The work leads back to the Valley's origins in military research and hippie culture, and forward to “artificial artificial intelligence” on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and to the digital labour discourse of the platform economy. Crowdsourcing and training data, outsourcing and automation: successive stages of one and the same transformation of the conditions of production.
- 2017Crowd Design: From Tools for Empowerment to Platform Capitalism
Book, Birkhäuser (BIRD) · publisher's page - 2015The Design of Creative Crowdwork
PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, London · PDF - 2014Crowd Work: Zurück in die Zukunft?
Book chapter, Bund-Verlag · German version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly · PDF - 2014Crowdsourcing Design: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Talk, re:publica Berlin · Video - 2013For a Few Dollars More
APRJA #BWPWAP, transmediale · Core77 Design Award · PDF - 2013The Outsourced / Outsourcing User
Talk, transmediale Berlin · Video - 2011Monster Soup, or: Making the Invisible Visible
Essay, Unmaking Things (RCA/V&A) · PDF
2008–2011
Amateur & Professional
What happens when amateurs work with the same tools as professionals, and there is a YouTube tutorial for every kind of specialist knowledge? My 2008 diploma thesis examines how this boundary blurs in design, driven by the question of the democratisation of designing and of the half-life of the skills one acquires while studying. In 2010 the text appears in Kritische Masse, published by form+zweck. In between, in 2009: Volkssport Design, a symposium on the state of the design profession at the Museum für Kommunikation Berlin; the research question turns into a public format for debate.
- 2011Gamer als Designer with Danny Pannicke
Article, Informatik Spektrum 34(6), Springer · written 2010 · PDF - 2010Kritische Masse
Book, form+zweck · contains Volksdesign · Read · PDF - 2010The role of professionals and amateurs in design
Radio interview, Deutschlandfunk · Transcript - 2010Volkssport Design: Nachspiel with Herbert Grüner
Proceedings of the 2009 symposium · PDF - 2009Web der Extreme: Flickering vs. Frugal
Cover story, form № 227 · PDF - 2009Volkssport design: live and let live?
Opinion, eye № 74, in English · PDF
2005–2007
Virtual Worlds
Between 2005 and 2007 my interest is in designing inside Second Life: what does a world look like that is built entirely by its users? How does control over the tools relate to ownership in the in-game economy, and who is actually allowed to design what? The work happens alongside my studies, leads to a first book in 2006 and, in 2007, to working as a designer on the virtual world Twinity at the Berlin startup Metaversum. Briefly it looked as though the internet really would become three-dimensional. The iPhone and social media put a quick end to the hype, which did not stop Mark Zuckerberg from failing with the same old idea again in 2021.
- 2007Semantic Tectonics
First prize, Reinventing the Virtual City, Shrinking Cities · German and English · Read · PDF - 2007Design in Second Life
Cover story, form № 215 · PDF - 2007Use Your Illusion
Book chapter, Space Time Play, Birkhäuser (eds. von Borries, Walz, Böttger) · PDF - 2006Parallel Realitäten
Book, Niggli · Braun-Feldweg award for critical design writing · out of print · PDF
