This morning in IULM, during the Milano Design Week 2026, a challenging conversation took place about how to embrace the heavy presence of AI in the creative space of design. It was led by a wonderful panel: Pietro Catania, Matteo Priola, Carla Sedini, Valeria Mogavero, and Elena de Kan.

Am I supposed to spend my entire life trying to recognize what is AI generated and what is not?

Matteo Pirola – architect, designer, and professor at IULM University – explains, through real life examples, some applications of AI in the design area, while highlighting its risks. Credibility is at stake, as well as the human ability to create. Is AI expanding or shrinking our imagination? Of course it provides us infinite possibilities to materialize our ideas into images, but real art is made by connections with people, experience, presence, and tangibility. AI cannot be a substitute, since, as the professor reminds us, we are present in a moment and in a place, we exist because cogito ergo sum: AI is only a tool to enhance human ideas.

Is AI able to distinguish?

Valeria Mogavero – Head of Design and Creative Producer at Balich Wonder Studio – sees architecture as an experience. Sound, light and space culminate, throught the means of architecture, into beauty. Because AI provides us endless possibilities, we must apply our human ability of distinguishing and choosing. Trusting only one mean, AI, means dooming our creativity, standardizing taste. AI and human intelligence must find a balance, she says, by following the motto: “(every idea) starts as an intuition and ends as a decision“. In order to be able to take a decision, we must aim at enhancing our creativity through experience. We must read, research, cultivate our sensitivity, while embracing external social changes.

Who does particpate in a city layout?

Carla Sedini – Associate professor at IULM- reflects on the importance of AI in the management of a city. Often, there is a lack of resources, and the citizens are too busy to be actively engaged in the transformation of the city, so here it come AI as a new participant. Just as a translator, it turns imagination into scenarios; individual thoughts into group thinking; ideas into images.

Besides the visible benefits, we must keep into account the risks and consequences of AI, such as biasis; the difficulty of catching the neighbourhood context; the cognitive overload. Finally, AI evolves itself from a mere consultation tool into a co-creator.

How does space affect our behaviour?

The last speaker was Elena de Kan – Director, Workplace Design & Consulting EMEA · Steelcase. She illustrates how the presence of Artificial Intelligence, redefines space and boundaries. As so, freedom and security cannot be achieved simultaneously nor at the same level. As an example, learning how to control AI capabilities put us through three phases: play and excitement; fear and justification; consciousness and control. Firstly, experimenting with AI was fun and gave us just a hint of its capabilities, then we felt hopeless facing its efficiency, now, we understood that AI is just a tool that must complement our awareness and knowledge.

Also, the process of creation must be taken slowly: creating has became a fast and almost compulsive way of doing. On the contrary, we must let our ideas sink in, instead of diverging and converging new inputs, as AI does, we should frame, incubate, and finally curate our ideas. The role of design is still creating objects, but also, creating tools to share and to put into the physical space, as an experience for real people.

_{Featured Images: Asia Ragazzo (ph)}