Design has always been about shaping possibility, but what happens when the tools we use begin to imagine alongside us? For industrial designers, this moment is both thrilling and unsettling: trying to seek out answers to what it means to design in an age where intelligence itself is evolving.

This session first sets the foundation of how industrial design can embrace AI not as a gimmick, but as a force for transformation, a collaborator, a mirror. We’ll move beyond the surface-level experiments of image generation and text prompts to uncover how AI can reshape design research and open radical new modes of creativity. At the same time, we’ll wrestle with the shadows—the seduction of speed, the flattening of originality, and the ethical ambiguities that come with giving machines a seat at the creative table.

The talk will highlight practical approaches to utilizing AI as a radical creative partner—augmenting, not replacing—the human imagination by one everyday example to bring this home. We will look inside an AI startup; Haither.com which at the core leverages AI to be your guide, your therapist in your pocket. For example, younger generations—including students and designers—mental wellbeing is a basic need. If AI can help guide something as intimate and essential as self-reflection, how might it reshape the way we design products, services, and experiences across every domain?