Designing with Intelligence

Research Vision

The cluster's objective is to develop the ability to design with various forms of intelligence, such as artificial intelligence (AI), human intelligence, material intelligence, and biological intelligence. As a first step, the cluster wants to raise awareness among designers and design students about integrating design values (e.g., aesthetics, creativity, meaning) with AI values (e.g., uncertainty, agency, emergence). Additionally, the cluster will develop practical examples of designs with intelligence in areas like mobility, health, and home energy that demonstrate these values. Ultimately, the cluster wants to establish a framework that clarifies what it means to design with intelligence and provides methodologies for its responsible implementation.

By adopting this approach, students and professionals who design with intelligence gain the ability to develop a new understanding of the world and themselves. This new perspective encourages them to think critically about how AI influences designers, users, the public, and policymakers.

Research Identity

The cluster includes diverse competences and expertise areas that are needed to cover the many aspects of the research vision. Cluster members will design with intelligence based on the values of conceptual originality, practice-based, theoretically inspired, contextually relevant, and holistic integration.

An elective Master course Creativity and Aesthetics of data and AI explores a new approach to AI education in design. The approach is based on the vision that designing with AI can produce new perspectives on sensory experiences, new conceptual designs for products and services, and new discourse on ways of living. Multidisciplinary student teams are encouraged to integrate personal and societal perspectives, and focus on the creativity and aesthetics of designing with AI.

The cluster is investigating of new roles of intelligent thermostats in shaping emerging comfort practices in Dutch households. The work includes a provocative redesign of a climate system that embraces the unpredictability and changeability of the weather and the human body. In collaboration with design studio Clarify, the thermostat interface is being developed into a Concept Design, parts of which may be integrated into Itho Daalderop’s commercial thermostat.