Sabine Niederer and Gabriele Colombo introduce ‘prompt design’ as a research approach to studying visual generative AI, setting it apart from ‘prompt engineering’ practices that focus on producing aesthetically pleasing or technically polished outputs. We will outline several strategies for visual research with generative AI: ambiguous prompting for bias research, reverse-engineered prompting and evocative prompting for machine critique, and comparative prompting for cross-model analysis. We demonstrate these strategies through a case study on how visual generative AI represents the topic of biodiversity, which finds that models tend to promote idealized and stereotypical representations of biodiversity, privileging certain species while omitting indicators of biodiversity loss.

Gabriele Colombo is a researcher at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, and a member of DensityDesign Lab, a research lab focusing on information visualization. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. He is affiliated with the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. In 2018, he was awarded a PhD in Design at the Politecnico di Milano. He is the co-author, with Sabine Niederer, of Visual Methods for Digital Research (Polity, 2024) and, with Michele Mauri, of Mapping Urban Biodiversity on the Web: Debates, Perceptions, and Engagement (Mimesis, 2025).

Sabine Niederer is Professor of Visual Methodologies at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, scientific director of the Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation (CoE CI), and co-coordinator of the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam. Sabine has a background in art history and new media studies, and she has curated and produced several publications, exhibitions, and public events about digital culture, new media, and imaginaries of the climate crisis. Together with Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (Amsterdam University of the Arts) and Patricia de Vries (Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam), she has initiated the ongoing artistic research program Climate Imaginaries. Together with Gabriele Colombo, she wrote Visual Methods for Digital Research (Polity, 2024).