Design Intelligences

As Fellow Professor at IT:U, Prof. Giaccardi leads the Design Intelligences research group, a multispecies, multiagent, and multisite collective dedicated to rethinking intelligence as a plural, relational, and more-than-human phenomenon. The group is based at Politecnico di Milano and extends into the Computational X doctoral program at IT:U. It brings together design, artificial intelligence, and ecological thinking to explore how diverse human, artificial, and ecological forms of intelligence can be understood, integrated, and mobilized toward regenerative futures.

The research group departs from dominant paradigms that frame intelligence as either an individual cognitive capacity or a computational property optimized for efficiency and control. Instead, it approaches intelligence as distributed across bodies, environments, infrastructures, and species, emerging through situated interactions and ongoing processes of negotiation. This shift enables the group to engage intelligence not as a fixed attribute, but as a dynamic condition of world-making across heterogeneous actors, scales, and temporalities.

At the core of the group’s work is the proposition that design plays a critical role in shaping how intelligences encounter one another and coexist. Interfaces, materials, and infrastructures are not neutral mediators, but active sites where different forms of agency are negotiated, aligned, or contested. Through design, the group seeks to cultivate new modes of attunement between human, artificial, and ecological systems, moving beyond extractive and anthropocentric logics toward more reciprocal, regenerative relations.

The Design Intelligences research group aims to contribute to both theoretical advancement and practical transformation. By reimagining intelligence as a more-than-human condition and experimenting with new forms of design mediation, the group seeks to open alternative pathways for living and designing in a time of planetary crisis. It positions design not simply as a problem-solving activity, but as a critical and generative practice for reconfiguring how we understand and inhabit the world together with, rather than apart from, the many intelligences that constitute it.