re shape forum @ HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd
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re shape Forum 2025 Recap: Rethinking AI in Art, Design, and Beyond
On May 15–16, 2025, the re shape Forum brought together a dynamic community of artists, designers, technologists, and researchers to explore AI’s evolving role in creativity, interaction, and society. Hosted by HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, the forum questioned dominant AI narratives, critiqued extractive systems, and envisioned regenerative futures grounded in more-than-human perspectives. Through critical keynotes, boundary-pushing experiments, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, re shape 2025 carved out a vibrant space for reimagining the intersection of AI, art, and design.
Highlights From Every Speaker:
Elisa Giaccardi – Design After Extraction: AI and the More-than-Human Turn
A powerful opening keynote from the Full Professor of Design at Politecnico di Milano. Elisa challenged extractive design paradigms, urging a shift toward more-than-human futures. Her talk introduced regenerative AI practices rooted in multispecies collaboration, engaging plants, fungi, animals, and bacteria, to explore AI’s potential beyond control and exploitation.
Tobias Revell – Design and the Social Construction of Artificial Intelligence
Tobias, Design Futures Lead at Arup, dissected the narratives shaping AI through speculative design. His critical lens exposed how design reinforces power structures around AI, and how alternative imaginaries can subvert tech determinism, broadening futures beyond speed and consumption.
Maria Luce Lupetti – Drawing Windows Into Better Timelines
From Politecnico di Torino, Maria Luce brought a deeply reflective critique on our current sociotechnical crises. She questioned the designer’s role amid systemic failures, environmental collapse, and media saturation, calling for practices that resist dystopia and aim for better collective futures.
Niklas Muhs – How Do We Want to Interface With AI?
Niklas, the first designer at Mistral AI and former MIT researcher, explored the mechanics of AI interfaces. By moving away from agent-centric paradigms, he proposed novel modes of human-AI interaction that are transparent, co-creative, and cognitively aligned with user needs.
Eryk Salvaggio – Feel the Noise: Notes from an Adversarial AI Artist
Eryk, an artist-hacker-researcher hybrid from Harvard metaLAB and RIT, took an adversarial approach to AI. His provocative talk questioned collaboration as a default mode, presenting artworks that subvert, disrupt, and “remove the imagination” of what AI is, revealing its hidden logics and epistemologies.
Niko Klein – Lighting a Fire With Damp Wood
As a prototyping lead at Figma, Niko offered a grounded, hands-on perspective on design tooling in an AI age. He spoke about the changing role of prototyping when working with AI, emphasizing flexibility, process-over-output, and the importance of “designing with uncertainty.”
Sures Kumar – Reframing Creative Practice
From Google DeepMind, Sures showcased a speculative design engine fully powered by AI. Through this case study, he introduced frameworks for embedding AI meaningfully in creative workflows, stressing the importance of intentionality, context, and criticality when integrating generative tools into practice.
Iohanna Nicenboim – Designing-with AI
As postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, Iohanna asked the audience to shift focus from human-centered to more-than-human design. Her talk spotlighted inclusive, ecological AI systems developed through participatory experimentation, challenging designers to listen to nonhuman voices in shaping future technologies.
Andreas Refsgaard – Beyond Prompting – Silly Interactive AI
Copenhagen-based artist and creative coder Andreas delivered a joyful and subversive talk on playful interaction design with AI. From meme machines to musical eye-trackers, he demonstrated how absurdity and humor can be powerful tools for critically engaging with digital systems, highlighting both the delight and danger of generative technologies.
A Forum That Lives Beyond the Event
re shape Forum 2025 was more than a series of talks, it was a collective act of imagination. It asked urgent questions: What stories are we telling about AI? Who gets to design it? What kinds of futures do we want to co-create?
The conversations sparked here will continue to resonate across design studios, labs, classrooms, and creative communities worldwide.
More info and speaker details: reshapeforum.hfg-gmuend.de
