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AIxDESIGN is a non-profit community organization of practical radicals making AI work for the rest of us. We bring together designers, creatives, researchers, educators, and coders to challenge dominant AI narratives, research alternatives, and make them real.
Since 2019, we have been building a third space that sits beyond the techno-utopia vs techno-dystopia extremes: where conflicting views sit together, where more than one future is possible, and where people maintain their agency rather than handing it to the machine or the market.
We aim to strengthen digital culture by building the creative sector’s capacity to engage critically with AI; questioning the tools, systems, and narratives that shape how creative practitioners work, and developing the knowledge and practices that help them shape those systems in return.
Everything starts with our community: 1,500+ members across 65 countries, in which we are participants and stewards. With this community, we work in three interconnected modes. First, we research. Guided by decolonial, intersectionally feminist, and participatory approaches, we ask different questions and use different methods than institutional research teams do, arriving at different answers about AI and who gets to shape it. We make things – installations, images, tools, and playbooks – that help people see themselves in the work and make it their own, feeding our collective imagination and radical curiosity. And we teach, because AI is not as complicated as it is made out to be. And the more people understand how it works and how it is made, the better placed we all are to shape it. Each mode feeds the others: research informs what we make; making reveals new questions; education puts both into practice, out in the wild.
AIxDESIGN is registered in Amsterdam and operates as a global community with a reach of 20,000+.
AI for the Rest of Us is built on AIxDESIGN’s AI literacy framework, which explores four ways of knowing AI, clustered into 2 categories: Understanding AI and Using AI.
AI is a socio-technical system. Understanding AI means contending with both halves: the stories we tell ourselves about how it works, and the mechanics that turn your inputs into outputs. Bringing these together changes how creative practitioners, and publics more broadly, engage with AI tools, critique their outputs, and imagine new ways of using, or not using, them.
AI as a story. We all tell ourselves stories about AI: how it works, who it is for, and what it can do. Many of these stories arrive without us noticing, through films, books, memes, quietly shaping our assumptions long before we have ever touched a tool. Others arrive through the news: the ecological cost of data centres, stolen artistic work, encoded bias and discrimination. When we name these stories and trace where they came from, we can unlearn them, situate ourselves amongst them, and start telling new stories that work better for us.
AI as an algorithm. How AI works is a mystery to most, and that is not an accident. Big Tech has framed AI as beyond understanding (at once complex math offering rational objectivity and inexplicable magic), placing it beyond scrutiny or responsibility. But knowing what type of AI you are using, and how it turns input into output, helps you use, adapt, and subvert these tools to get the outputs you are looking for.
At AIxDESIGN, using AI means two things: using readymade AI tools, and making your own. Each builds a different kind of know-how. Using readymade tools helps us understand how different inputs make different outputs. Making your own AI models deepens that intuition, revealing how the decisions made during building shape what AI produces, regardless of what you put in later.
AI as a tool. Readymade tools (like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini) are designed for general-purpose use, not the specific, situated needs of a creative practitioner, cultural worker, or community organizer. Getting these tools to serve your vision and values takes a community of practice and plenty of iteration. Knowing where and how to configure and personalize these tools changes what you make and who you make it for.
AI as a material. Not every use case can be served by a readymade tool. Some practices are too localized, too nuanced, or too taboo to be credibly served by one. Think of a community archive built on data that's only locally available, a language model finetuned on an underrecorded dialect, an object detection tool designed around a community's own way of seeing rather than an outsider's. These are the kinds of things DIY AI makes possible, and it's the most hands-on way to deepen your intuition about AI.
AI for the Rest of Us brings together three types of activities: the Residency for intensive, cohort-based learning; Field Notes, a monthly gathering for collective sensemaking; and the Open Studio, which opens the Residency to the public alongside contextualized insights from Field Notes.
Each program stream informs the others. Together, they put seven years of research, making, and educating into something others in the field can follow and build upon.
Twice a year, a cohort of 20 designers, artists, and other creative practitioners gathers for weekly 2-hour sessions over 8 weeks at the AIxDESIGN Studio, NDSM, Amsterdam. Each cohort focuses on a different type of AI – Language Models (LMs) in Spring 2027, Computer Vision in Autumn 2027 – but follows the same arc: AI as a Story, AI as an Algorithm, AI as a Tool, and AI as a Material.