Workshop 3
Workshop 3
Design Cognition in the Era of Agentic AI
Design Cognition in the Era of Agentic AI
Tuesday 7 July 2026, 9:00 am to 12:30 am
Workshop Chairs
Ada Hurst, University of Waterloo, Canada
Christopher McTeague, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Niccolo Becattini, Politecnico di Milano
Filippo Chiarello, Universita di Pisa
Jianxi Luo, City University of Hong Kong
Agentic AI in design refers to artificial intelligence systems that act as autonomous collaborators within the design process. Instead of merely generating outputs from prompts, these systems pursue defined goals, make intermediate decisions, iterate solutions, and adapt based on feedback and data. They can plan multi-step workflows, evaluate alternatives against constraints (such as usability, cost, or brand consistency), and refine results over time. In practice, this shifts the designer’s role from executing individual artifacts to directing, supervising, and shaping goal-driven design systems.
As AI systems in design become more autonomous (setting goals, generating options, evaluating outcomes, and refining their own work) they are no longer just tools, but active participants in the design process. This raises important questions on two sides. How does working with goal-directed AI change designers’ sense of agency, creativity, responsibility, and skill development? And how should our knowledge of human motivation, decision-making, trust, and reflection inform the way we design these systems themselves? If design agents can plan, evaluate, and adapt, what kind of “psychology” are we building into them, and what should remain distinctly human? This workshop explores these questions at the intersection of AI, design practice and psychological theory.
This workshop is co-organised by two Special Interest Groups of the Design Society: the Cognitive Design Science SIG and the AIxDesign SIG.
The workshop will aim to:
Increase awareness and shared understanding of agentic AI in design, including its implications for both design practice and design research.
Promote knowledge exchange between communities working on design cognition (psychology of design) and AI in design.
Identify opportunities, challenges, and risks at two complementary levels:
Understanding how agentic AI systems affect designers’ cognition, creativity, agency, responsibility, and skill development.
Applying insights from design cognition research (e.g.,on goal setting, metacognition, motivation, and decision-making) to inform the development of agentic AI models.
Explore how the emergence of agentic design systems may reshape research questions, methods, and theories in both fields.
Workshop Format
Welcome and Framing (25 minutes)
We begin with a short introduction to the workshop’s motivation and goals, followed by brief participant introductions. Two short framing talks will establish a shared foundation:
What does design cognition research study?
What characterizes agentic AI in design?
Discussion Block #1: Opportunities at the Intersection (30 minutes)
Participants will engage in a structured, facilitated discussion to identify opportunities and challenges at the intersection of design cognition and agentic AI. Ideas will be captured and synthesized in real time (e.g., via thematic clustering and shared visual documentation) to build a collective map of key issues.
-- Break (15 minutes) --
Lightning Presentations (40 minutes)
Short invited and selected presentations (5-7 minutes each) will showcase emerging ideas and case studies related to the workshop theme. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
The evolving role of the designer in agentic AI-driven design
Human-AI interaction and agency
Cognitive and algorithmic bias in design processes
Methodological shifts in studying human and artificial “cognition”
Industrial and applied perspectives
Discussion Block #2: Generating Research Questions (45 minutes)
Building on the presentations, participants will work in small groups to formulate concrete research questions and identify theoretical and methodological gaps. Contributions will be synthesized across groups to create a shared set of research priorities.
Future Collaboration Incubator (25 minutes)
The workshop concludes with a structured collaboration session. Participants will cluster around shared interests and outline potential joint initiatives, with the aim of initiating concrete cross-disciplinary collaborations beyond the workshop.
The workshop is open to all design researchers, practitioners and educators interested in applications of agentic AI in design practice and research. Participants who wish to make a lightning presentation are encouraged to contact the workshop co-chairs by June 1st, 2026.
All attendees at the workshop need to register either as an addition to the DCC'26 conference registration at a cost of €27.50 (€25 + VAT), or if not registered for the conference at a cost of €55 (€50 + VAT). Please go the DCC'26 Registration page to add this workshop to your registration.