Symposium Design X Intelligence:
AI & Critical Futures
New York Institute of Technology
School of Architecture and Design
1 – 7 p.m.
16 W. 61st St., 11th-floor auditorium
New York City

Design X Intelligence Symposium

Design × Intelligence symposium investigates the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and the design disciplines. As AI becomes increasingly capable of generating visual concepts and analyzing information and complex systems, it transforms not just the tools designers use but the nature of design agency itself. What happens to creativity, authorship, and decision-making when intelligent systems can initiate design solutions, learn user needs, predict results, and intervene in the design process?

By engaging scholars, technology experts, architecture and design practitioners, the symposium positions design as a critical actor in shaping AI’s trajectory. Rather than reacting to technological change, designers are invited to actively negotiate what ethical, imaginative, and humane forms of intelligence we want to cultivate—and how these will reshape the creative professions of the future.

Title of Talk: BEYOND DATA-DRIVEN AESTHETICS

by Alexandros Haridis

At the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, “creation”-“evaluation” processes were identified as one of seven key aspects of human intelligence that future Al research must address. Nearly seventy years later, AI systems increasingly simulate these processes across architecture, art, design, and scientific discovery. This talk presents Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics, a study of how twentieth- and early twenty-first-century academic and industry efforts in the United States transformed computing into a medium for both creative production and aesthetic judgment in architecture and the applied arts. The talk coincides with a multimedia exhibition at MIT’s Keller Gallery (April-August 2026).