Conference Agenda

Generative AI (GenAI) has sparked intense media debate, yet design research has often echoed these narratives rather than examining how GenAI reshapes everyday design practices. This paper presents a year-long auto-ethnographic study involving 34 games and apps created through vibe coding, a GenAI-native approach that uses natural-language prompts to generate code. The study reveals distinct qualities that unsettle design processes: playful intervention, creative forgetting, spectral echoes, inventive excess, and fragile limits. Two key insights emerge: designing with GenAI requires deliberate engagement with cultural archetypes and treating AI as an unruly collaborator. Drawing on John Oswald’s 1985 concept of ‘plunderphonics’, the paper situates GenAI within a lineage of experimental art and design tactics. The paper offers auto-ethnographic insights into how GenAI reshapes design practice and introduces ‘Plundergeist’ as a critical and playful ethos for designing with GenAI through cultural plundering and unruly collaboration.

In recent years, AI has become increasingly entangled with design practice, whether as a tool, a design material, or a collaborator. Alongside these opportunities, it is necessary to recognise AI as a socio-technical system that reproduces existing gender hierarchies. Treating design as a political site of intervention; this paper examines how designers can ground their practice in addressing gender bias in AI. Drawing on a scoping review of gender bias in AI, feminist design perspectives, and existing interventions in design research, we argue that designers occupy a consequential role as critical reflectors, bridge-builders, and sense-makers, uniquely positioned to question how AI systems are implemented and represented. The paper contribution lies in articulating how designers can embrace this position, and we conclude by reasserting the necessity of feminist design responses in shaping more equitable AI futures.

Empathy is a key differentiator in Nigel Cross' model of Design as a third discipline, and has become established as a vital component of both research and practice. Yet agreed definitions of empathy in design remain elusive, and the roles it should play have been questioned and problematised. Recent developments in the capabilities of Large Language Models have generated discussion of the possibility of both simulated and actual empathic behaviour by artificial intelligences. In this paper we gather and synthesise relevant philosophical debates on the nature and operation of AI-empathy. Concepts of alterity in the work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas are deployed as a lens to illuminate key aspects of the challenge which the emergence of AI-empathy provokes for design. Ultimately we reflect that this challenge may be the stimulus required to compel design research to properly engage with the question of empathy in design.

This paper presents Small AI as a conceptual lever for designers to resist

the ‘bigger is better’ trend in the discourse and development of Generative AI. We

explore different types of Small AI: initially in relation to the size of models, as

smaller models require less computational resources for both training and

inference, thus implying a smaller ecological footprint. However, we extend the

meaning of smallness to apply to political, epistemic and cultural domains as well.

In this vein, the paper posits Small AI as an imaginary-in-the-making, and a rallying

concept for an alternative innovation agenda that holds, in the spirit of E.F.

Schumacher’s famous dictum, that it is small (AI) and not big (AI) that is beautiful.

The paper draws conclusions for those designing with/for AI, positing Small AI as a

form of ‘unmaking’ with which designers may re-articulate the entangled relations

between users, computation, and worlds.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a fundamentally hauntological

technology. This paper interrogates that character of contemporary AI systems and

explores why this feature undermines the goals of design research. We argue the

need for an exorcism of GenAI, or at least a constructive rebellion against the ghosts

it systematically produces. GenAI is convergence-driven and nuance-averse. It aims

for reasonableness as a first-order output. Its training data reflects a profound

anthropocentrism that extinguishes plurality. As a result, GenAI accelerates the

foreclosure of possible worlds by preferentially reproducing that which is

statistically probable and culturally dominant. By contrast, design relies upon

idiosyncrasy, rupture, serendipity, and the cultivation of plurality. In short, the very

qualities systematically eroded by the probabilistic logic of generative systems.

Through a lens of glitch feminism, we propose error, derangement, and an

enthusiastic embrace of the uncomputable as resistance strategies to retain what

is fundamentally human within inhuman systems.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly embedded in creative practice, offering new possibilities for ideation while raising concerns about reduced idea diversity and diminished cognitive engagement. This paper introduces generative analogical intelligence (GAI) as a human-centered approach that foregrounds analogy, material culture, and speculative reasoning to sustain creative thinking. Through a research-through-design (RtD) methodology, the study develops and refines the FABRIC framework (form, action, behavior, relation, intention, context) across three co-design phases involving design students, non-specialists, and design professionals. Findings suggest that analogy-based cross-pollination can reintroduce productive cognitive friction, support both divergent and convergent thinking, and generate varied outcomes. However, participants also experienced difficulty interpreting analogy objects without structured guidance. The FABRIC framework addresses this by scaffolding relational mapping across domains. The paper contributes a conceptual model (GAI), a methodological framework (FABRIC), and empirical insights into sustaining creative agency in the context of generative systems.