The DesignAI Studio is a small design research group based in Ithaca, NY. We design, build, and evaluate interactive systems that improve how people interact with AI — our orientation is toward improving situations, not just describing or theorizing them. Projects here involve real ambiguity: you discover the problem and invent the response at the same time. We care about craft — not just whether something works for a study, but whether it's genuinely good. Students develop a professional identity as design researchers, holding together human understanding, design thinking, system building, and theoretical reasoning. Mentorship is close and feedback is direct.

If this sounds like the kind of work you want to do, I'd love to hear from you — ideally several months before the application deadline, so we have time to explore whether the fit is mutual. It helps if you share your CV and unofficial transcript, what draws you to design research specifically (not just human-AI interaction as a topic), and a project you've made that you're proud of and what you were trying to achieve with it.