Human-Centered Design and Artificial Intelligence

Great design begins with a deep understanding of the humans it serves. Every digital experience a designer puts into the world—whether a product interface, a video experience, a learning environment, or a piece of interactive media—succeeds or fails on exactly that basis. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) can generate content, code, and creative assets at speed, the ability to deeply understand human needs, motivations, and behavior becomes more consequential. In this course, students use design thinking as the backbone of their practice: an empathy-first, iterative process moving from deep human understanding through insight, ideation, and prototyping to tested experience. What sets this course apart is the integration of behavioral science as a working lens throughout: how humans perceive and direct attention, how we operate between fast intuitive responses and slower deliberate reasoning, how emotion shapes what we remember, and how the structure of an experience influences behavior as much as its content. Through mini design sprints, intentional experimentation, and peer dialogues and critique, students engage in hands-on practice across three connected phases. They develop deep audience understanding through interviews, surveys, observation, and contextual inquiry; translate insights into concepts through sense-making (synthesizing research into meaning and insights) and sense-breaking (disrupting assumptions to open new possibilities); and finally prototype experiences using contemporary tools including generative AI, testing with users and iterating based on what they find. Students bring an authentic design challenge of their own and carry it through the full process. By the end, they have a portfolio-ready prototype, working fluency in behavioral science and design methodology, and a transferable framework for human-centered practice.