AI Design

About

Design is an iterative, situated, and highly visual form of reasoning. Our work in AI Design asks how computational systems can support that process without reducing it to prompt writing or automated image generation.

We study AI as a collaborator in early-stage ideation, design communication, public participation, and evaluation. This includes conversational systems for participatory design, visual chatbots that can reason with diagrams and spatial representations, and methods for approximating selected dimensions of human response to architectural spaces.

Our scientific focus is on when these systems are useful, when they fail, and how they alter the relationship between designers, stakeholders, and design evidence. We combine prototype development with empirical evaluation — user studies, design experiments, and comparisons with established participation and assessment methods.

The long-term goal is not to replace designers, but to develop accountable AI tools that expand the kinds of feedback, representation, and reflection available during design — while keeping human judgment at the center of the process.