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POLYU SCHOOL OF DESIGN · SD2112 · SEMESTER 1 · 2026/27

Artificial intelligence in design.

Two ways to teach a machine: write the rule, or show the examples. Thirteen weeks on what that does to the tools you use, the products you make, and the job.

Giovanni Lion · giovanni.lion@polyu.edu.hk

Slides · one deck per week · press S for speaker notes, O for overview · R restarts a live sketch
SD2112 · WEEK 01

Two ways to teach a machine

The journey, a definition of AI, chairs, using vs incorporating, the designer's turn, a cup at the edge.

x SD2112 · WEEK 02

Rules that make things

Machine A, LeWitt, Nees and Nake drawn step by step, Koch's curve and the Mandelbrot zoom, p5.js you can edit in the slides, and a machine that writes rules from your spec.

x SD2112 · WEEK 03

Learning from examples

What a concept is, Rosch's fruit, AI born twice, a perceptron that finds its own line, Hinton, the chips made for games, modern AI in one timeline, and two concepts blended into one picture.

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SD2112 · WEEKS 04 – 13

Language, image, sound; AI inside products; the designer's turn

Decks are published here the day before each class.

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Slides as PDF: Week 1 · Week 2 · Week 3. The html decks run the p5.js sketches live; the PDFs and the PowerPoints show stills.

Course documents

SYLLABUS · 2026/27

Thirteen weeks, four modules, five components

Weekly plan, assessment, rubrics, readings, rules.

x PLAYLIST · BY NICOLÒ

Fifteen videos, in the order we need them

AlphaGo, Illiac Suite, Cage, Tinguely, Kaprow, then LLMs, diffusion, CLIP, sound, chatbots.

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