Since the emergence of generative AI (GenAI) tools, designers’ work has been changing in visible and implicit ways, both in how they create and in what they create. When designing physical objects and environments, GenAI tools act as creative partners, helping designers sketch ideas, generate CAD models, render forms, and write code for interactive systems. Much has been written about how GenAI is reshaping creative processes and how design practice is adapting to this new reality. Increasingly, the designers’ focus shifts to a new type of Large Language Object (LLO) that can sense, interpret, adapt, and communicate with its environment and the people who interact with it through Large Language Models (LLMs) (Coelho and Labrune Citation2024). The implication that has received far less attention is how networked intelligence is transforming communication, not only between people and smart objects, but also among the objects themselves. We argue that this transformation will have a profound impact on how we design future objects. Instead of mapping predefined interactions, we will define the conditions and boundaries for how information flows and embrace emergent behavior and capabilities.
