This course explores the intersection of AI, creativity, and interaction design, moving beyond the hype to uncover meaningful applications. Students will be challenged to rethink human-AI collaboration, and use machine intelligence to design future products, interfaces, and experiences. Through hands-on prototyping and experimentation, we will explore new interaction models, synthetic perception, and AI-driven design processes.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has leapt from the realm of sci-fi and research to real world application with incredible speed. But as with any rapidly evolving technology, it brings many challenges in implementation. Sorting through a noisy, hype-filled landscape to find truly valuable use cases requires a discerning eye, but also a creative perspective that can imagine radically different approaches to familiar problems. In this course, we’ll work collectively to design and prototype a series of future products and objects built around different shades of artificial intelligence.
Prerequisites
No previous knowledge or specific software is required, but students should familiarise themselves with at least one existing generative AI model (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) prior to attending.
How you’ll learn
During this course, participants will develop an interaction design project around artificial intelligence technology. Working alone or in a group, you will go from concept to prototype, culminating in a working demo that will be presented at the end of the course, along with a depiction of its relative design process. In so doing, participants will directly experience some of the primary challenges of creating alongside other intelligences.
What you’ll learn
What to bring
Grishma Rao is a designer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of emerging technology, storytelling, and human-centred design. As a Senior Interaction Design Lead at IDEO, she leads multidisciplinary teams in creating thoughtful, future-facing experiences rooted in deep human insight. With 16 years of experience designing digital products and simplifying complex systems across Asia, Europe, and the U.S., she brings a distinctive global perspective to her work.
For the past decade, her work has focused on generative and conversational AI—exploring new paradigms of human-computer interaction and telepresence, and often asking: how do we build meaningful relationships with unfamiliar technologies? Through explorations of embodied computing and multimodal, sensory experiences, she approaches these questions with a critical, culturally aware lens on the evolving relationship between humans and intelligent machines.
She has taught postgraduate courses on user experience design, presented at international conferences and exhibitions, and her work has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, and Vice, as well as recognised by Core77 and IxDA. She is also an award-winning writer and former music journalist, currently working on her first book.
Jose Chavarria is an Interaction Designer and Creative Technologist with a background in Industrial Design Engineering. He's a CIID alumni and has been working in the Interaction Design field since 2015.
Jose started as an Interaction Engineer and later became an R&D Lead at a design studio in San Jose, Costa Rica where he created interactive art installations. He then joined CIID as resident faculty, managing the digital fabrication lab and mentoring students.
After that, he worked as a Creative Technologist and Strategist for an architecture firm, designing AR and VR solutions, digital products, and interactive installations.
Jose's work has been recognised by the Core77 Design Awards in 2021 for Speculative Design and Costa Rica Design Week in 2022 for Interactive Design.
Passionate about human perception and Life-Centred Design, Jose aims to create technology solutions that benefit all forms of life, not just humans.
But in short, he builds stuff and wears hats.
