Design AI – Innovation beyond human imagination

SUTD is the world’s first Design AI university. Our pivot to Design AI centres on the notion that AI is our partner, part of a human-machine team, working hand-in-hand and leveraging on each other’s strengths to develop innovative solutions for real-world problems.

This concept of “innovation beyond human imagination” is based on research at SUTD’s Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities that found that mastery in the AI/digital age is grounded in knowing how to work with many people and machines.

Contrary to the “Turing Test”, which pushed the frontiers of AI but inadvertently ended up pitting AI against humans, putting them in competition, and hence dislocating humans in work, SUTD’s research concluded that the future must be “Not Turing”.

SUTD’s Design AI principle puts the human back at the centre and leverages human and AI imagination on the very real-world concept of teamwork. Here, humans and AI work together as team-players, bouncing ideas off each other to find solutions to real-world problems. It seeks to understand where humans do better than AI; where AI does better than humans; and where one of the team players is an AI model, ensures that the resultant outputs are far beyond anything either AI or humans can conceive.

When and when not to deploy AI

The ability to know when and when not to use AI is another critical part of Design AI. SUTD’s strong emphasis on the humanities, arts, and social sciences, in tandem with a grounding in design and technology, ensures that students strengthen their sensibilities about bias, privacy and accountability – all key considerations when working with intelligent tech.

“When we design solutions to make people’s lives better, we have to figure out where AI fits and doesn’t fit. This is where SUTD’s core in design and collaborative team-based learning gives us the deep foundations to develop this new skill with the new possibilities of Gen AI. Our unique interdisciplinary pedagogy, which focuses almost exclusively on team-based learning, is also the perfect backdrop for Design AI because AI is now a fellow team-mate. You interact with it, debate with it, agree and disagree to find better solutions. Importantly, it allows for proper checks and balances that is increasingly important in this age of AI. These skills cannot be replaced by AI so it is important to know when AI can do the job and do it better, and when using it will result in a poorer result.”