Meta-Design, Figure and Style between Drawing and Generative AI

The use of generative AI in design today complements established modes of ideation through Drawing, understood in its traditional sense as “meta-design”. In text-to-image, image-to-image, and image-to-model pipelines, ideation takes the form of a chain of transductions across media and codes (sketch, plate, text/prompt, image, model, ren-der), where each step redefines pertinences and thresholds of “figurability”. Within this framework, the “question of figure” concerns the stabilization of readings: which conventions, competences, and procedures turn a trace into a figure that can be shared, discussed, and verified across different actors. The paper advances a semiotic theory of Drawing as meta-design, conceived as a form of “writing” capable of governing the alternation between an iconic pertinence (recognition of objects, scenes, actions) and a plastic pertinence of images (topological, eidetic, chromatic, and textural differences). This distinction allows “style” and “character” to be treated as outcomes of finite grids and Type/Token regimes. In its computational counterpart, drawing relies on explicit image description: predominantly “plastic” descriptors (edge statistics, Gabor, Haralick/GLCM, Radon, moments/histograms) build feature vectors on which profiles of recurrence and difference can be learned. By retracing a genealogy of the architectural still life, we exemplify three modalities of abstract figuration - Sironi/Muzio (Monza, 1930), the Purism of Le Corbusier/Ozenfant, and the meta-avant-gardes (Hejduk) - showing how Drawing can operate today as meta-design at the junction between traditional ideation and generative AI.