Design practice is dependent on sometimes innocuous watershed moments. Relative changes, such as cheaper processing technology allow key decisions to be delegated to economic logic. Mostly, as practitioners we welcome these logics, or at the very least accept their ‘truth’. Pausing this phenomena, and taking time to reflect on its implications, our proposal is to explore the impact of value shifts within design education and practice by deliberately creating our own value-change phenomena: a paper written entirely by an algorithm designed to maximise citations.

We will create an algorithmically driven digital device which generates a paper on the topic of 'Design in an Age of Austerity'. It will do this through a combined technique of mining and data-scraping existing academic sources, undertaking bibliometric assessment and analysis, (looking to maximise citations, and increase its own 'value'), and in the process create a 'plausible' position on the subject, through purely computational means.

At the core of this proposal is a questioning of the value we place on academic research, where design research fits with and can add value to practise, and imagining possible futures for design research in an age of computational generative design and parametrics.

It builds on the generative design innovations of Casey Reas and Ben Fry (MIT medialab) and the processing.org project, the computational language analysis of digital design studios such as lust.nl (The Hague), but also opens up the political and ethical questions of 'values' in higher education under late capitalism, raised by, amongst others, Claire Bishop (Artificial Hells)