• A total of $50 million worth of Design AI initiatives will be rolled out over the next three to five years.
• Central to this shift is the view that AI should no longer be viewed as a tool – the way technology has traditionally been considered – but as a partner.
• Expands human-human group interactions to include human-machine and machine-machine collaborations, resulting in solutions that are far superior to when AI is used as a mere tool.
• SUTD’s strong foundations in interdisciplinary and cohort-based learning serve as an ideal backdrop for Design AI implementation.
• The SUTD pivot to Design AI will extend to education, research and backend operations.

The Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) is pivoting towards artificial intelligence (AI) with a $50 million investment over the next three to five years – a move that establishes it as the world’s first university to specialise in design and AI across education and research, for both undergraduates and postgraduates.

The investment will involve a series of initiatives aimed at equipping SUTD students with Design AI skills that will ensure they are well-placed to navigate the fast-changing AI-driven world of today – and tomorrow.

For starters, all students will undergo a project-based course in foundational Design AI in their first year. Plans are also afoot to build unique “AI Team” platforms. This SUTD offering essentially involves using AI as learning partners instead of being treated as mere tools. For example, a cohort class can have four AI assistants – that together with the instructors – interact with the students to develop their research, design, observation, and interview skills. Humans and AI will work together as a team to find solutions. This is very different from just giving students AI tools. This platform allows for “independent thought” by the AI so that it can offer constructive feedback and suggestions to its human team partners – resulting in a more robust outcome.

SUTD’s pivot to AI is premised on the principle that AI should no longer be viewed as a technological tool to be used by humans, but as part of a human-machine team, working together hand-in-hand and leveraging on each other’s strengths to find 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 at work, SUTD’s research concluded that the future must be “Not Turing”.

Put simply, this concept 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.

Elaborating on this move, SUTD President Professor Phoon Kok Kwang said: “Firstly, it is important to get out of the old tech mode of thinking when looking at SUTD. In previous generations of advanced technologies, including AI, schools taught students to use them as tools. For example, using data analysis software as an automation tool or mapping software for territory management and business analysis. But the advent of Generative AI has opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

“With Gen AI, we can teach students to work with the AI like part of a team. This is something that is easily implemented in SUTD given our unique cohort-based pedagogy. Because our students already spend most of their time working in teams, the introduction of Design AI as another team player will serve as a natural progression in their education. We can, for example, use it to generate ideas and images, interacting with it like a joint brainstorming session. We can also use it to create AI assistants to generate specific ideas and images customised to our needs, like we are designing a product together. Certainly, knowing when to use AI as a tool, when to work with it as a team member, and when to do neither is the new frontier skill of the future!” he said.

The ability to know when and when not to deploy AI is a critical part of Design AI.

“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 focusses 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,” said Prof Phoon.

As an illustration of how discerning Design AI is, Prof Phoon cited the example of how SUTD deployed the concept to help a sports trading organisation assess if it was possible to replace its human traders with AI. The study found that the human traders who were tasked with deciding on the odds in each soccer match did not just possess statistical skills which could be easily replaced by AI, but also human predictive capabilities which focussed on “illogical emotions” like how a football fan would continue to place bets on his favourite team despite its poor performance simply out of loyalty.

“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 outcome,” said Prof Phoon.

In pivoting towards AI, SUTD will be introducing even more Design AI undergraduate courses over the next 12 months, including a newly-improved AI minor. This builds on its existing strengths in Design AI which began in 2020 when SUTD became the first university in the world to introduce a Design AI Degree – well before AI was even a buzzword. That pioneer batch of DAI students graduated in 2024 and have found employment in a wide spectrum of industries including banking, retail, tech and defence.

In postgraduate education, SUTD will be launching Singapore’s first MSc (DAI-E) which is a Master’s programme in Design AI targeted specifically at mid-career professionals. In particular, programme participants will be actively involved in projects with industry partners to ensure real-world relevance of their studies.

SUTD, through its professional education arm SUTD Academy, has also been aggressively rolling out Design AI courses for working professionals. Companies like Certis, Singhealth and OCBC have sent their staff to courses like Generative AI for Business and Data Storytelling with Visualisation as part of a concerted effort to leverage on AI in their daily processes. Demand for training in AI-related programmes has been strong and in the last year alone, SUTD has skilled more than 1,300 mid-career professionals in the effective use of AI.