Conference Agenda

Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, is embedded through incremental features within everyday digital tools used in design research, framed as productivity or usability enhancements. While design scholarship has addressed AI’s implications for creativity, ethics, and authorship, less attention has been paid to how researchers experience these systems in practice. As LLMs recede into the background infrastructure of research, their subtle and often invisible nudges shape inquiry, attention, and what becomes visible as knowledge.

Design research, with its emphasis on context-aware inquiry, reflective and iterative methods, and the active role of artifacts and interfaces in shaping knowledge, is uniquely positioned to examine how AI-augmented research tools redistribute agency and influence epistemic practice. Embedded AI is not neutral and introduces new risks for design research (Van Der Maden et al. 2024). We suggest that while platforms claim to empower users, their designs enact subtle governance through defaults, nudges, and automated redirection, shaping research trajectories and agency without explicit consent.