AI + Design Symposium: Learning from AI

Matthew Allen researches the history and theory of architecture, computation, and aesthetics. Allen is the author of the forthcoming book, Architecture becomes Programming: Modernism and the Computer, 1960-1990, as well as essays in venues such as Log, e-flux, Domus, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Allen holds a PhD and a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and other institutions. Allen has worked for MOS, Preston Scott Cohen, and other firms at the leading edge of contemporary architectural practice.

Ian Bogost is a philosopher, computationalist, and award-winning game designer.

His 10 books include Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (with Nick Montfort), Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, and Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games.

Bogost is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, where he writes and edits on science, technology, design, and culture. He is co-editor of the Platform Studies book series, about how the technical design of computing systems influences creativity, and the Object Lessons book and essay series, about the secret lives of ordinary things.

Bogost’s games about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited or held in collections internationally, at venues including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Telfair Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, the Laboral Centro de Arte, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

His independent games include Cow Clicker, a Facebook game send-up that was the subject of a Wired magazine feature, and A Slow Year, a collection of videogame poems for Atari VCS, Windows, and Mac, which was a finalist at the Independent Games Festival and won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the IndieCade Festival.

Ewan Branda is an educator, architectural historian, former software developer, and former architect. He teaches studios and seminars at McGill University and the Université de Montréal. Branda’s research interests include architecture’s place in the information society, late-modern architectural technocracy, and the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence in the representation and production of architecture. He earned a doctorate in critical studies in architecture from UCLA, a master’s in design computation from MIT, and a bachelor’s in architecture from the University of Waterloo. He has served as the multimedia reviews editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and as a board member for the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, the Electronic Literature Organization, and The Electronic Book Review.

Carla Diana is a designer, author, and educator who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design and tangible interaction. She is the founding head of the 4D design department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. In addition to her studio practice, she is a design advisor for Diligent Robotics, where advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning manifest in robot assistants to help healthcare workers. Diana has been part of innovation design firms Smart Design and Frog Design, where she worked on a range of products from robots to connected home appliances. Her work has appeared on the covers of Popular Science, Technology Review, and The New York Times Sunday Review. Diana’s books include “My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human”, and the world’s first children’s book on 3D printing, “LEO the Maker Prince: Journeys in 3D Printing.” She was previously co-host for the podcast Robopsych. Her latest research is focused on autonomous vehicle systems as public transportation solutions. Diana holds a master’s degree in 3D design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from The Cooper Union.

Catherine Griffiths is a media artist, designer, and researcher exploring the politics of technology. She seeks to make palpable invisible computational forces that shape power and structure social systems. Her creative research takes places at the intersection of critical code studies, social documentary, and algorithmic visualization. By creating simulations, short films, video installations, and critical software pieces, her work reveals and contests normative logics of machine learning algorithms and thinks through new counter-algorithmic imaginaries. Griffiths’ research has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at Geidei University in Tokyo. Recent articles have been published in Prospectives Journal and Gradient Journal. She earned a doctorate in interdisciplinary media arts and Practice from the University of Southern California, and a master’s in Architectural Design from The Bartlett, University College London. She teaches architectural design and digital studies at the University of Michigan.

Jonathan Hanahan is a researcher, critical designer, and educator who loves technology and is equally terrified by it.

He uses technology to critique technology. His speculative practice explores the physical, cultural, and social ramifications of digital experiences and the role technology plays in shaping our everyday realities. He makes thick interfaces — tools, devices, software, artifacts, websites, and videos that agitate the digital facade and reveal the complexity underneath our devices’ thin veneer.

Currently, Hanahan’s research prioritizes alternative and ambient interfaces with technology. In 2022, he founded the Sensory and Ambient Interfaces Lab (SAIL). SAIL investigates a future with fewer screens and how non-visual interfaces and interactions lead to a more digitally enhanced yet less digitally imposed future. The lab works in compromised environments where a screen is either unavailable, dangerous or distracting and investigates how information might be relayed through ambient design strategies that compliment human experiences.

Hanahan earned his bachelor of architecture from Virginia Tech and master of fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. Hanahan is an associate professor at the Sam Fox School, where he teaches interaction design and creative technologies. He is also the co-founder and co-director of Fox Fridays, an interdisciplinary workshop series encouraging experimentation with tools, processes, and technology.

Karel Klein is an architect and educator who has been working with various artificial intelligence technologies since 2016. Her ongoing project is an investigation into crossbred image-objects produced using atypically trained GANs and their capacity for contemporary myth-making in architecture. In the same way that imaginative vocabulary and metaphoric style were primary, if literary, instruments for the invention of new mythologies for the Surrealists, the strange and idiosyncratic qualities of images produced using artificial intelligence are similarly a kind of matter metaphor-ed and made visible by the cyborg imagination. Klein is interested in the re-enchantment of the architectural body — one that both foments and succumbs to sensual perceptions, and one that discovers new and unexpected relations to the world beyond the realm of the rational. Her most recent essay addressing this pursuit, “To Think a New Thing, AI, Metaphor and the Fantasies of Knowing,” was published in The Plan Journal in 2023. Klein teaches at the SCI-Arc, WashU, and University of Pennsylvania.

Sharvari Mhatre’s architectural interest lies in exploring the entangled realities in which contemporary life is embedded and enhancing the vibrance of that complexity by using available, non-traditional and emerging technologies to design spaces. She holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and a Bachelor of Architecture with a concentration in Morphology from Pratt Institute.

She is currently an architectural designer at Cecil Baker + Partners based in Philadelphia. She was previously an assistant lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania where she taught Design Studios that focused on Artificial Intelligence, Digital and Robotic Fabrication. In the summer of 2020, she was a design fellow at PennPraxis at the University of Pennsylvania re-imagining a former slate quarry as a heritage park linked to a growing trail system in Pennsylvania’s ‘Slate Belt.’

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist who innovates with artificial intelligence in ways that positively impact our community and the environment. She is an associate professor of artificial intelligence and the arts at the University of Florida and founder of the university’s AI Climate Justice Lab, as well as the Talk To Me About Water Collective. She also founded Wampum.Codes, an award-winning podcast and ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation. Wampum.Codes was awarded a Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio from 2019-2020 and was featured at the 2021 imagineNative festival. She continued her research in 2021 at Stanford University as an artist and technologist in residence, and has been part of a variety of additional award-winning projects and nonprofits. Winger-Bearskin is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and a federally enrolled member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.

Andrew Witt is an associate professor in practice in architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, construction, and culture. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form. Witt is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based design and technology studio that combines imagination and evidence for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. Their clients include large manufacturers, material fabricators, government agencies, infrastructure companies, investment funds, medical startups, and cultural institutions, and their work has been exhibited widely. Witt has a longstanding research interest in the disciplinary exchanges between design and science, particularly through the media and visualizations of mathematics. He is the author of “Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture,” and “Light Harmonies: The Rhythmic Photographs of Heinrich Heidersberger.” He is a fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Macdowell, a Graham Foundation and Harvard Data Science Initiative grantee, a World Frontiers Forum Pioneer, among other awards.