Innovative Thinking and AI Collaboration

This unit develops advanced creative strategies and cognitive techniques—analogical thinking, creative destruction, SCAMPER, inversion, and Janusian thinking—and teaches students to partner with generative AI to expand and iterate architectural and interior design concepts. It builds on foundational design-process skills from Unit 1 and prepares students to produce, evaluate, and select robust design alternatives for prototyping in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze different types of analogies (e.g., literal, structural, functional) and select appropriate analogical strategies to generate at least three distinct architectural or interior design concepts for a given brief
• Apply the SCAMPER method, creative destruction exercises, inversion thinking, and Janusian thinking to systematically transform an existing design and document the evolution of multiple alternative solutions
• Demonstrate effective partnering with generative AI by composing domain-specific prompts, iterating on AI outputs, and integrating validated AI-generated concepts into design options with documented rationale
• Evaluate and compare generated design alternatives using defined criteria (function, aesthetics, sustainability, user experience) and use inversion/Janusian assessments to identify potential failure modes and prioritize solutions for prototyping