Christina Doumpioti: Call My Agent(s). Notes on applied AI from design practice

Call My Agent(s): Notes on applied AI from design practice

AI|APE Public Talk mit Christina Doumpioti, Mittwoch, 11. November 2026, 12:00 bis 12:45, Projektraum DAP 1/259, TU Wien, Karlsplatz 13. Teilnahme auch online über Zoom. Der Vortrag ist öffentlich und findet auf Englisch statt.

Abstract

Computation entered architecture as a way of transferring and translating data, embedding information into the design process so that form could be found rather than drawn. Morphogenesis in that sense meant setting up the rules and the constraints and letting the result emerge from running them.

The current condition works differently. Multiple agents hold partial views of a project and exchange them while the work is running, so information enters during the process instead of being embedded ahead of it, and the process can revise its own terms as it goes. I call this conversational morphogenesis.

The lecture follows that shift through work on generated architectural images, on environmental and parametric design, on conversational agents, and on applications that link fragments of a project across text, image, geometry, data and decision. Some of these repeat operations that are already known, some make a constraint legible or generate alternatives inside a defined field, and a few let a project change its own terms.

The questions the lecture stays with are what should be automated, what still asks for interpretation, and how much difference has to be kept between the agents for the exchange to produce anything the project did not already contain. And underneath those, what are we doing this for, automating toward productivity, automating to make room for creative work, or augmenting toward architectures we could not have anticipated?

Bio

Christina Doumpioti is an architect and computational designer moving between practice, research and teaching. She studied at the Architectural Association, completing the EmTech MArch, and later returned as a studio master on the same programme. She worked at Arup Associates London on computational and simulation workflows, and completed a PhD at EPFL on generative and analytical methods in environmental design, followed by seven years teaching in the Media x Design Lab. She has taught most recently at the University of Liverpool and the University of Brighton. She currently leads Design 4.0 within Innovation and Product at Halter AG in Zurich, where she is building multi-objective, agentic and AI-assisted design workflows in AEC.