Communication Design in the Age of AI Cultures. A Relational Map for a Paradigm Shift

As artificial intelligence becomes established as a technological infrastructure, its effects extend beyond the technical domain, reshaping cultural, social, and epistemological processes. Although this cross-cutting nature reflects the systemic scale of the phenomenon, it also creates a degree of instability in the surrounding discourse, where heterogeneous levels of analysis tend to overlap, fostering a predominantly substitutionist framing centred on the automation of design activities. Building on this observation, the paper offers a theoretical and programmatic inquiry into the different positions AI assumes in relation to communication design. It identifies five main relationships: AI as an environment, transforming the contexts in which content is produced and circulated; as an interpretative tool, enabling the analysis of complex communication systems; as a design tool, introducing models of delegation and collaboration into the design process; as design material, embedded in communication artefacts and shaping their relational capacities; and as an object of design intervention, requiring forms of mediation, representation, and interpretation that can make intelligent systems understandable and governable. Across these relationships, AI also serves a reflexive function, acting as an epistemic device that calls into question fundamental categories such as authorship, creativity, competence, judgement, and responsibility. The transformations introduced by AI therefore require renewed engagement with the history, foundations, and pedagogical traditions of the discipline – not as a legacy to be preserved, but as a field through which continuities and discontinuities in the ongoing transformation can be recognised. The proposed model offers an open interpretative framework for situating AI within a disciplinary trajectory and identifying what it radicalises, transforms, and destabilises in communication design.