Toward a Reflective Pedagogy of AI-Aided Design: Insights from an Experimental Design Studio

This study explores a structured, semester-long integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into architectural design education through an experimental design studio course at Abdullah Gül University. Rather than positioning AI as a mere tool for automation, the studio investigated its potential as a speculative design collaborator, embedded within a pedagogical framework centered on research-by-design. Students engaged in iterative processes of problem framing, concept development, and visual exploration, using AI systems both as generative aids and dialogic partners. The course emphasized critical authorship and interpretive reasoning, prompting students to interrogate AI outputs and incorporate them into evolving manual design practices. Through hybrid prompt strategies, students developed the ability to translate abstract spatial ideas into grounded proposals, navigating ambiguity and reconciling machine-driven outputs with contextual constraints. Findings suggest that AI, when scaffolded within reflective pedagogies, can expand students’ cognitive engagement, conceptual depth, and representational fluency without displacing human design agency. This research contributes an alternative model of AI-aided pedagogy—one that destabilizes deterministic workflows and instead fosters epistemic diversity, design literacy, and critical synthesis.