Design Education and Practice

Latest papers

• One Tool, One Taste? How Vibe Coding Trades Collective Diversity for Individual Creativity

  L\'eonard Boussioux, Ziyi Zhao, Kanghyun Cho · 1 October 2026

  Vibe-coding systems turn natural-language instructions into deployed websites, but little is known about the diversity of designs produced within a shared production context. We study 73 promotional websites created by graduate students with Lovable for distinct real businesses under a graded assign…

• A Probabilistic Approach for Model Alignment with Human Comparisons

  Junyu Cao, Mohsen Bayati · 25 September 2026

  A growing trend involves integrating human knowledge into learning frameworks, leveraging subtle human feedback to refine AI models. While these approaches have shown promising results in practice, the theoretical understanding of when and why such approaches are effective remains limited. This work…

• Does AI Save Time on Product Design? A Randomized Controlled Experiment of AI Prompt-to-Design Workflows

  Remy Stewart, Olabode Anise, Andrew Hogan, Augustus Griffin · 23 September 2026

  AI tools for digital product design now offer prompt-to-design capabilities, allowing designers and their non-designer colleagues to create prototypes through conversational workflows with large language models (LLMs). While these tools promise time savings, experimental evidence in product design r…

• Generative AI and Extended Reality in Collaborative Architectural Design Education: An Exploratory Studio Study

  Yao Xiao, Max Chen, Yichen Li, Nathaniel Powers, Maxwell Wiesenfeld, Gillian Smith, Soroush Farzin, Shichao Liu · 15 September 2026

  Architectural design education relies heavily on visual ideation and representation to support collaborative learning in studio environments. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and extended reality (XR) offer new opportunities for rapid idea exploration and immersive spati…

• Enabling Creative Exploration for Vibe Design Agents

  Yifan Zhang, Nghi D. Q. Bui, Georgios Evangelopoulos, Arnaud Benard · 15 September 2026

  Vibe design agents turn natural-language briefs into rendered interfaces and frontend code. Yet a useful design agent should do more than produce one valid page: it should help users explore coherent alternatives. Increasing token-level temperature is a blunt solution because it varies aesthetic dec…

• Personalizing Personal Health Interfaces: Co-Design with Generative AI

  Karthik S. Bhat, Vidhi Shah, Vedika Agnihotri, Dong Whi Yoo, Koustuv Saha · 15 September 2026

  Personal health interfaces present wellbeing data through standardized dashboards that rarely fit how people interpret or act on it. Personalizing them to what people would like to see for themselves often requires design and technical expertise, a barrier that generative AI may potentially lower. T…

• CommerceVibe: Learning to Design E-Commerce Creatives as Executable Visual Code via Dual-Feedback Reinforcement Learning

  Yajiao Xu, Jin Zhang, Jiangbo Ai, Tao Jiang, Mo Xu, Lina Huang, Chengfu Huo · 31 August 2026

  High-quality e-commerce creatives are essential for presenting products and conveying marketing messages. Recent diffusion models enable scalable creative generation and produce visually compelling images, but their flattened raster outputs often contain distorted text and inconsistent product detai…

• Rethinking Pretraining for Specialized Design Data: Evidence from the JONES-19 Cultural Design Dataset

  Alexandros Haridis, Charles Zhou · 4 August 2026

  Design and architectural archives encode expert human knowledge in graphical formats, providing a critical testbed for design-inspired Machine Learning (ML) challenges absent with typical computer vision benchmarks. Building on JONES-19, a small-size image dataset based on The Grammar of Ornament (L…

• AI as Friction for Reflection Support in Ideation

  Janin Koch, Xiaohan Liao, G\'ery Casiez · 30 July 2026

  Generative AI tools for creative work tend to be designed around the goal of removing friction, on the assumption that smoother iteration and faster output translate into more value for the designer. We argue, however, that this framing leaves out something important about how design ideation works,…

• Large Language Models in Architecture Studio: A Framework for Learning Outcomes

  Juan David Salazar Rodriguez, Sam Conrad Joyce, Nachamma Sockalingam, Khoo Eng Tat, Julfendi · 21 July 2026

  The study explores the role of large language models (LLMs) in the context of the architectural design studio, understood as the pedagogical core of architectural education. Traditionally, the studio has functioned as an experiential learning space where students tackle design problems through refle…

• A study of GenAI usage by Design Students Analysis of Survey Results and Journals of AI practices at the Politecnico di Milano in 2025/2026

  Stefana Broadbent · 21 July 2026

  The results of a survey on the use of GenAI by the design students of the Politecnico di Milano raises major questions around the role of AI in the Design Process. A domain specific set of questions alongside the more general purpose probes about GenAI usage, delivers insights into the particular pr…

• Critsly: An Artefact-Aware AI Critique Teammate for Design Education and Project-Based Learning

  Nizam Kadir, Juan David Salazar Rodriguez, Sumaiyya Al · 14 July 2026

  Critique is central to design education and project-based learning, yet high-quality critique is often scarce, uneven, hard to document, and disconnected from evolving artefacts. We present Critsly, an artefact-aware AI critique workspace that turns AI from a detached feedback tool into a critique t…

• Creativity from Friction: Human-AI Interaction for Exploratory Structural Design

  Ricardo Maia Avelino, Rita Sevastjanova, Tom Van Mele, Philippe Block, Mennatallah El-Assady · 9 July 2026

  AI agents that generate final answers based on user input often do not meet the needs of creative fields. Fields such as structural design and architecture need interactive systems that help users externalise and develop ideas, explore alternatives, and refine partial solutions. The final product of…

• Enhancing Creativity in 3D Generative Design via a TRIZ-Inspired Text-to-CAD Framework

  Dongeon Lee, Leekyo Jeong, Soyoung Yoo, Sunwoong Yang, Namwoo Kang · 23 June 2026

  Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in supporting engineering design tasks, including computer-aided design (CAD) automation. However, most existing LLM-based 3D CAD generation approaches primarily focus on geometric precision and instruction-follo…

• Creative Quality Alignment: Expert Tacit Knowledge Transfer via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning

  Bo Zou, Chao Xu · 26 May 2026

  This paper provides an empirical implementation of the creative quality metric proposed in Calibrated Surprise (Zou & Xu, 2026a). The question this paper addresses is: does this mathematical claim hold at the engineering level? To make the answer as general as possible, we deliberately choose the …

• A Deep Dive into Axiomatic Design -- Part I: Problem Formulation

  Aydin Homay · 26 May 2026

  Problem formulation translating customer needs and constraints into a minimum set of independent first-level functional requirements, is arguably the most critical step in every design framework, including axiomatic design yet it is frequently misunderstood or underestimated in practice. This paper …

• Physics-in-the-Loop: A Hybrid Agentic Architecture for Validated CAD Engineering Design

  Elias Berger, Muhammad Usama, Jan Mehlstäubl, Bernhard Saske, Kristin Paetzold-Byhain · 20 May 2026

  Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate Computer-Aided Design (CAD), yet lack physical comprehension required for reliable engineering design. Instead of attempting to implicitly learn physical laws from data, we propose a Hybrid Agentic-Physical Architecture that embeds validated knowledge-based …

• Vibe Coding in Product Teams: Reconfiguring AI-Assisted Workflows, Prototyping, and Collaboration

  Jie Li, Youyang Hou, Laura Lin, Ruihao Zhu, Hancheng Cao, Abdallah El Ali · 4 May 2026

  Generative AI is reshaping product design practices through "vibe coding," where product team members express intent in natural language and AI translates it into functional prototypes and code. Despite rapid adoption, little research has examined how vibe coding reconfigures product development wor…

• DesignWeaver: Dimensional Scaffolding for Text-to-Image Product Design

  Sirui Tao, Ivan Liang, Cindy Peng, Zhiqing Wang, Srishti Palani, Steven P. Dow · 30 March 2026

  Generative AI has enabled novice designers to quickly create professional-looking visual representations for product concepts. However, novices have limited domain knowledge that could constrain their ability to write prompts that effectively explore a product design space. To understand how experts…

• Supervising Ralph Wiggum: Exploring a Metacognitive Co-Regulation Agentic AI Loop for Engineering Design

  Zeda Xu, Nikolas Martelaro, Christopher McComb · 27 March 2026

  The engineering design research community has studied agentic AI systems that use Large Language Model (LLM) agents to automate the engineering design process. However, these systems are prone to some of the same pathologies that plague humans. Just as human designers, LLM design agents can fixate o…

• What You Prompt is What You Get: Increasing Transparency of Prompting Using Prompt Cards

  Amandine M. Caut, Beimnet Zenebe, Amy Rouillard, David J. T. Sumpter · 16 March 2026

  The rapid advancement and impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have given rise to the field of prompt engineering, the practice of crafting inputs to guide LLMs toward high-quality, task-relevant outputs. A critical challenge facing the field is the lack of standardised prompt doc…

• SuperSkillsStack: Agency, Domain Knowledge, Imagination, and Taste in Human-AI Design Education

  Qian Huang, King Wang Poon · 10 March 2026

  This study examines how students integrate generative artificial intelligence (AI) into design projects through the lens of the SuperSkillsStack framework, which identifies four key human competencies for effective human-AI collaboration: Agency, Domain Knowledge, Imagination, and Taste. As generati…

• Design Generative AI for Practitioners: Exploring Interaction Approaches Aligned with Creative Practice

  Xiaohan Peng, Wendy E. Mackay, Janin Koch · 4 March 2026

  Design is a non-linear, reflective process in which practitioners engage with visual, semantic, and other expressive materials to explore, iterate, and refine ideas. As Generative AI (GenAI) becomes integrated into professional design practice, traditional interaction approaches focusing on prompts …

• Speculating for Epiplexity: How to Learn the Most from Speculative Design?

  Botao Amber Hu · 26 February 2026

  Speculative design uses provocative "what if?" scenarios to explore possible sociotechnical futures, yet lacks rigorous criteria for assessing the quality of speculation. We address this gap by reframing speculative design through an information-theoretic lens as a resource-bounded knowledge generat…

• Beyond Needle(s) in the Embodied Haystack: Environment, Architecture, and Training Considerations for Long Context Reasoning

  Bosung Kim, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu · 20 February 2026

  We introduce $\infty$-THOR, a new framework for long-horizon embodied tasks that advances long-context understanding in embodied AI. $\infty$-THOR provides: (1) a generation framework for synthesizing scalable, reproducible, and unlimited long-horizon trajectories; (2) a novel embodied QA task, Need…