Fall 2026
Office Hours: Monday 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM | Book a Meeting
Mei Xi Chia | 📧
Tuesday and Thursday 9:30 AM - 10:50 AM
407 S. Craig Street, Room 104 | (In-person expectation)
The AI Augmented Designer will explore how designers can augment and accelerate their work with the use of AI. The course will involve explorations of AI use across the design process. Students will design and develop four prototypes on their own. They will document their process and, through guided discussions with a reflective AI agent, critically reflect on if and how AI changes their practice for better or worse. The course will help students develop an understanding of when and where AI can best support their work. Throughout the course, we will have readings and discussions on scholarly thought regarding the symbiosis of designers and AI.
This course is intended for students with strong design fundamentals looking to take the next step in their work. The course will introduce students to off-the-shelf tools as well as skills for building their own augmentation tools using generally available AI systems.
The course will introduce students to:
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
Each project in this course runs through a full Double Diamond design innovation process. These four phases are the shared vocabulary of the course: your projects, your critiques, and your reflection conversations will all refer to them by name.
Project 1 will be a redesign of an existing product. Students will use AI to research the product and its users (Discover), analyze that research to define where the current design falls short (Define), ideate improvements to the product (Develop), and prototype, test, and evaluate the new design (Deliver). The core learning objective of this project is to introduce students to the basic use of AI for each phase of the design process.
Duration: 4 weeks
Project 2 will be a design of a competitor to an existing product. Students will use AI to research the market and the users (Discover), define an opportunity the incumbent does not serve (Define), ideate competing concepts (Develop), and prototype, test, and evaluate the new product (Deliver). The core learning objective of this project is to have students explore more advanced use of AI for design and reflect upon where AI is useful and where it is not in their own design process.
Duration: 3 weeks
Project 3 will have students design an AI-powered tool to support their design process. Here, students are their own user: reflecting on their own work in Projects 1 and 2 is the research (Discover). Students will choose one aspect of their design process to support with AI and define what the tool needs to do (Define), ideate how it could work (Develop), then build, test, and evaluate a tool with an AI backend (Deliver). The core learning objective of this project is to have students move beyond using prompt-based chat tools or other pre-built tools toward building their own tools that support their individual design process and provide improved user interfaces for working with AI.
Duration: 4 weeks
Project 4 will have students design a new product. Students will identify a problem to solve and a user group to target and conduct AI-assisted user research (Discover), develop a set of design requirements and specifications (Define), ideate and select a concept (Develop), and prototype, test, and evaluate the new product (Deliver). The core learning objective of this project is to have students solidify their personal AI-augmented design process and to test how much their process has changed with the use of AI.
Duration: 3 weeks
For each project you will submit two videos, both due at 9:00 AM on demo day, before class. Two videos rather than one because your peers are assessing two different things: the design outcome, and how you used AI to reach it.
You will present the same material live in class on demo day and get immediate feedback from your peers. The videos are what your peers go back to afterward, when they write their final written critiques.
Upload each video to Canvas so we can check that it is complete, and send the link to your assigned peers by email or chat so they can watch it while writing their critique. The videos are graded complete/incomplete and carry no points, but submitting them on time is what makes peer critique possible.
This is a project-based learning course where students experiment with AI as a means to augment their design practice. However, it is really a course on developing effective judgement and critical thinking on the use of AI in design. We will approach all potential uses of AI from a skeptical but inquisitive perspective. One person's use of AI in one phase of the design process could be accelerating while another's could be detrimental. We will withhold judgement until presented with real-world evidence. By the end of this course, students should develop the skills to test new uses of AI and make judgements on its utility for themselves. In the end, students should work to produce good design and to know when they have produced good design, regardless of their use of AI.
This course will have students work individually on their projects. This is intentional for three primary reasons:
This course is highly experimental and aims to test how far students can go by augmenting their process with AI. Students should expect to be challenged in their use of AI while trying to create great design. Projects are intentionally short to promote more iterations of full design processes. There will be numerous points for feedback on the course itself. The course activities may be subject to change based on feedback. Students should expect to be active in their own learning.
This course will focus on in-class studio time where students can work on their projects, help each other, and get feedback on their work. Much of this feedback will come through desk critiques: the instructors will circulate during studio and work through your project with you at your desk. These are informal, ungraded, and frequent, and they are the primary way you will get feedback on your project work as it develops. Students are expected to be present in class.
This course expects you to produce working prototypes. The final deliverables for each project will be functional prototypes that you have tested with real users. While not all aspects of a prototype must be functional, the distinguishing aspects that you believe set the design apart from the competition must be functional. The course believes that you learn by building, testing, and iterating.
This course expects students to reflect on their process and use of AI. When evaluating your work, you should consistently ask yourself: "Is this good?"
Reflection in this course happens through conversation rather than through writing a document on your own. At the end of each project, you will sit down with a reflective AI agent that will interview you about your work. It will ask you what you did, probe the choices you made, and discuss your use of AI with you. The agent is designed to push past surface-level answers and to keep asking until you have reflected deeply enough on your process. Your self-critique of the project happens in this same conversation.
By the end of a reflection conversation, you should be able to convey what you did, what you learned, and what you would do differently next time.
Come to these conversations prepared to talk about specifics from your studio time, your desk critiques, and your own work. The agent can only go as deep as you let it.
This course is graded on completion. Your grade is primarily based on whether you did the work, not on how good your design was or how impressive your critique sounded. There are two graded components for each project: the peer critiques you give, and the reflection and self-critique conversation you complete with the agent.
Peer critique (50% of each project). You receive full credit for completing your assigned peer critiques. Critiques are expected to be constructive and made in good faith: a critique that is blank, one line, or obviously not engaged with the work does not count as complete.
Reflection and self-critique (50% of each project). Your reflection and self-critique happen together in conversation with the course's reflective AI agent, as described above. The agent is designed to guide you to a complete reflection: it will keep working with you until you have covered your process, your use of AI, and your own assessment of your work. You receive full credit for completing the conversation.
Critique sessions will occur during class on the last day of each project. Your project and process videos are due at 9:00 AM that morning, before class. Written peer critiques and your reflection conversation are both due the following Monday by 11:59 PM. Students who miss the critique session for an excused reason still submit their videos on time so their peers can critique the work, and their own critiques remain due on the same deadline.
Peer critiques and reflection conversations completed after the deadline will receive a 10% penalty per day.
Below, you will find a list of tools that you can use to complete the course. Most of them are free to students. The one thing we recommend you pay for is a subscription-based AI coding system, described below. Everything else has a free option, though you may find that you want to try other tools that require payment. You are responsible for your own usage limits and costs for any paid tool. Consider the benefits of paid tools over free ones and think about their use as an investment in yourself. Nik recommends that you pay monthly rather than annually, so that you can cancel at any time and try a different system if the one you picked is not working for you.
This course assumes that you have a basic foundation in interaction design, programming, and user-centered research. Advanced knowledge of these topics is not required, however, when using AI to support your design work you should be able to discern if AI is working well or not based on your experience in each area. The course will not cover the basics of these topics.
Attendance is expected for all class sessions. This course is designed as a studio environment where you will work alongside your peers, learn from each other, and receive rapid critique from each other and the instructor. An empty studio is not a fun studio! Being present ensures you have dedicated time to make progress on your projects, which helps reduce the amount of work you need to do outside of class.
It is especially important to attend class on project critique days, as these sessions are essential for giving and receiving feedback.
Note that your reflection conversations will draw on your class studio time and on the desk critiques you receive. If you miss class, you will likely not have much to say to the reflection agent, and you will find the conversation much harder to complete.
If you are sick, please stay home and get well. Missing class due to illness is excused.
If you are unable to attend class for any other reason, please contact the instructor as soon as possible.
Because self-critique is graded on completion, nothing about your grade improves if you tell the agent your work went well when it did not. Take this as an opportunity to hone your skill at evaluating your own work. Be critical of your own work and do not be afraid to say what you did well and what you could do better. This is an important skill to develop as a designer producing professional work, and it is the one part of this course that is genuinely difficult to fake to yourself.
You are ALLOWED to use AI for your project and design work (the class expects this). You are required to document your use of AI for each part of your work in your reflections.
You are NOT ALLOWED to use AI to generate and write your peer-critique or self-critique. Your writing must be your own as this is a key part of your learning. You are ALLOWED to use AI to edit your writing for grammar and spelling.
Reflections are the one place where you will work with an AI by design: your reflection is a conversation with the course's reflective AI agent. In that conversation, the thinking and the answers must still be your own. You are NOT ALLOWED to use another AI tool to generate your responses to the reflection agent. Doing so defeats the entire purpose of the exercise.
Your design work, your self-critique, and your reflections should be your own work. You should collaborate with your peers by providing feedback and critique of their work. You should also share methods and tools with your peers. Overall, collaborate on process, not product.
If you have a disability and require accommodations but do not already have them approved by the Office of Disability Resources, please apply for accommodations through the Application section of the Disability Resources Online Portal. If you already have accommodations approved with Disability Resources, please use the Accommodations Management section of the Disability Resources Online Portal to notify me about your accommodations, and discuss your accommodations and needs with me as early in the semester as possible. I will work with you to ensure that accommodations are provided as appropriate.