D@S Lab—Design@Scale with Human-AI Collaboration

Last week saw the launch of eight new Delft AI-Labs.  Over the course of 2020-2021 TU Delft is establishing a total of 24 TU Delft AI-labs where experts in AI foundations work together with experts in AI challenges. Amongst the eight new labs announced last week, is D@S Lab, established by Professor Gerd Kortuem, together with Assistant Professor Evangelos Niforatos from IDE and Assistant Professor Dr Jie Yang, and Assistant Professor Dr Ujwal Gadiraju from EEMCS. The D@S Lab will focus on the opportunity of combining Artificial Intelligence with Human Intelligence to design at scale, thereby increasing our ability to tackle systemic challenges.

Nowadays, design is tasked with an ever-increasing number of systemic challenges in society such as health and wellbeing, climate action, mobility and inclusiveness. However, our design practices still remain limited in scope, involving small groups of design experts and users working over a relatively short time frame to move from problem framing to final solution. In fact, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the limitations of common design approaches, such as the inability to engage with remote users and stakeholders at scale, the inability to understand human behaviour and complex social systems, and the inability to assess the longitudinal impact of our design interventions.

Hybrid Intelligence (HI)—the integration of Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence at scale—bears immense potential for transforming all aspects of design, and thus empowering designers to tackle more complex societal problems. The mission of the D@S Lab is to bring together TU Delft expertise in design and computer science to establish a centre of excellence in Hybrid Intelligence for Societal-Scale Design. Hybrid Intelligence can play a key role in reducing the complexity of design for large scale societal problems by orchestrating large-scale design activities involving people, data and machines; by informing effective design interventions; by predicting the impact of design interventions; by monitoring and learning from the implementation of design interventions, and by adapting design interventions over time to maximise their impact.

D@S Lab is the second Delft AI-Lab founded by TU Delft’s  Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, following the establishment of the Designing Intelligence Lab in 2020. A recruitment campaign to find the PhD candidates for the eight new Delft AI-Labs is expected to launch at the end of this month.