Speakers

Giada Pistilli

Giada Pistilli is a philosopher specialized in AI ethics, focusing on conversational agents and generative AI with a PhD from Sorbonne University. As Principal Ethicist at Hugging Face, she conducts interdisciplinary research that bridges philosophical inquiry with technological development. In this role, she applies ethical principles to the challenges of large-scale AI systems.

Kevin Andersen

Kevin Andersen designs products and tools across bits and atoms that extend human ability to think and create. He currently serve as a freelance designer through his one-person operation, Super Ultra.

Today’s geopolitical climate and the reliance on big technological companies forced us to reconsider which technologies to use and for what purpose.

In our choice for speakers and participants we look closer to home and showcase projects that value respect, creative freedom and inclusion, and societal purpose beyond hype, efficiency, and pure economic power.

Keynotes

[Giada Pistilli] INTIMA: Measuring What Happens When Design Meets Emotion // INTIMA is a benchmark built to evaluate how language models respond when users reach out emotionally, in order to measure not just what AI systems say, but how they make us feel. Drawing on real user data and psychological theory, it maps the social and emotional behaviors that emerge in conversation: empathy, attachment, boundaries, and care. In this keynote, I’ll unpack what INTIMA reveals about existing general-purpose models, why companionship behaviors arise unintentionally, and how open-source evaluation can help designers rethink interactions before they turn into dependencies.

[Kevin Andersen] AI as just another material - three years of studying, teaching and building products // In his talk, Kevin will share prototypes and learnings from spending the past three years studying, teaching and building patents, tools and products that use machine learning and artificial intelligence. With clients including the New York Times, MIT, the LEGO Group and Design Systems International, he has been exploring how designers, engineers and organizations can use generative AI systems as new materials for product innovation.

Sessions

[Industry Session - 10:15] Design x AI x Industry // Tom van Veen (Accenture Industrial Design), Jelle Stienstra (style + code), Luke Noothout + Iona Keeley (Clever°Franke) will talk about Design & AI challenges in industry, from tangible AI, chatbots to running entire company through AI-powered tools. What are opportunities and responsibilities of designers in the field of Design and AI, has design agency increased with the advent of AI, or is the discipline ready for disruption?

[Parallel session - 13:30] Break-out Session Design Education & AI // As education and research budgets are shrinking, there is a push for AI to ... well, what exactly? Four speaker-panelists in this session will spotlight the good, the bad and the ugly of AI in design education. How can we re-imagine the role of AI in our design education practices? What is the purpose of teaching and learning design with, through, and for AI? In this session, we exchange our thoughts on learning goals, activities and assessment criteria for AI and design education. We also share ideas on when and how to resist AI to foreground creative making, authenticity and critical thinking.

[Parallel session - 13:30] Break-out Session Design & AI Manifesto // Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in the geopolitical climate forces design and designers to re-imagine the relationship between design and AI. In this new relationship the opposites and extremes become clearer and into focus. What is the current status quo in the Netherlands? What are current advances, tensions and perspectives? Where are we heading? In this session, we will discuss, collect, and crystallize the state of the art of design and AI. To this end, in a guided session we are going to make Future Zines to visualize our Design & AI futures and use them as a starting point for a collective manifesto to Re-imagine, Re-sist and Re-purpose AI. The session is open to everybody, no designerly skills needed. We will publish the Manifesto in a open-access booklet with a DOI sponsored by the JEDAI Network.

[Academic session - 15:15] Design & AI, what the academics can tell us. // Vera van der Burg (TU Delft), Francesca Toso (UTwente), Jesse Benjamin (TU Eindhoven) and other design researchers will re-imagine the current fast and efficient AI practices and argue for more equitable, slow and reflective ways of designing with and for AI.

Registration

Join us to experience and discuss the creative imagination and joyful resistance that is emerging in academia, design studios, and policymaking. Together, we can develop and research design and AI with a purpose for society, for design, and for realizing the promise of a future worth wanting.