Technologies that feel inevitable underwent rhetorical closure, ending debate about alternatives (Pinch & Bijker, 1984). Once designs become pervasive, alternatives become nearly unimaginable. What appear to be personal technology choices in items like bikes, breast pumps, and smartphones actually represent collective rhetorical closures. These closures reflect ideologies and hegemonic preferences for individualized "solutions" over shared alternatives. Without design literacy, publics cannot recognize these closures as contingent, and the idea that technologies and our sociotechnical systems can be shaped differently remains hidden.
W.J.T. Mitchell's (1994) "ekphrastic hope"—where rhetoric makes us see that alternatives are possible—offers methodological grounding for reopening rhetorical closures. Ekphrasis can enable recognition of embedded design decisions and restore human agency through practice. In this study, we conducted collaborative workshops with non-design undergraduates to explore familiarity's effect on generative thinking and found that familiarity with prompts foreclosed imagination (outputs using familiar affordances echoed marketing language), while more ambiguous artifacts facilitated imaginative range. In addition, we found a gap between participants' self-reported agency to contribute to making the future and their observed behaviors.
AI currently exists in its interpretive flexibility phase—multiple competing meanings coexist before dominant interpretations bring rhetorical closure. Practicing collaborative ekphrasis therefore offers an anticipatory intervention, an opportunity to practice interpretation before closure compounds and human agency atrophies. Furthermore, given AI's increasing presence in meaning creation, expanding design literacy before AI systems naturalize dependence and foreclose alternatives can help ensure that the futures we consider more fully express a range of inputs and possibilities.