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AI-based design tools are proliferating in professional software to assist engineering and industrial designers in complex manufacturing and design tasks. These tools take on more agentic roles than traditional computer-aided design tools and are often portrayed as “co-creators.” Yet, working effectively with such systems requires different skills than working with complex CAD tools alone. To date, we know little about how engineering designers learn to work with AI-based design tools. In this study, we observed trained designers as they learned to work with two AI-based tools on a realistic design task. We find that designers face many challenges in learning to effectively co-create with current systems, including challenges in understanding and adjusting AI outputs and in communicating their design goals. Based on our findings, we highlight several design opportunities to better support designer-AI co-creation. 

material science and digital fabrication to create shape-changing and dynamic interfaces. In this workshop, participants will investigate ways in whichMMtools can effectively support building STEM learning toolkits for novice learners from diverse backgrounds. Participants will engage in hands-on activities designing and simulating water-triggered morphing artifacts using a software design tool and fabricating them with low-cost materials. This workshop aims to collectively explore creative opportunities and barriers o introducing emerging STEM concepts and skills to novice learners. We hope to ideate frameworks for designing educational toolkits which leverage the accessible nature of morphing beads, democratizing a process that would typically require advanced material synthesis and specialized lab settings. Designers, educators, learning scientists, and researchers are welcome to join us in brainstorming ways to develop toolkits to support creative exploration in education with MM. 

Seagrass meadows are twice as effective as forests at capturing and storing carbon, but human activities have caused them to gradually disappear over the last few decades. We take a nature-centered design approach on contextual inquiry and collaborative designs methods to consolidate knowledge from marine and material sciences to industrial design. This pictorial documents a dialogue between designers and scientists to co-create an ecological intervention using digital fabrication for manufacturing morphing ceramics for seagrass meadow restoration.