Design, AI, and empathy: brief reflections on a year in the classroom

This has been the year I finally got to dive deep into teaching. Since fall 2025, I've taught six courses at Olin College of Engineering and Brown University, and this fall I'm teaching two more. Here's what my year of teaching included:

Designing with Emerging Technologies: Generative AI (Olin, Fall 2025)

Quantitative Engineering Analysis 1 (Olin, Fall 2025), where I taught the ethics and AI components with Sam Michalka and David Shuman teaching the rest.

Technology Entrepreneurship & Commercialization II (Brown, Fall 2025), with Ja-Nae Duane and Chaki Ng

Products and Markets (Olin, Spring 2026), with Donald Ger, Tim Sauter, Joanne Pratt, and Sarah Bloomer

Collaborative Design (Olin, Spring 2026), with Dan Koff, Jon Adler, Joanne Pratt, Sarah Bloomer, and Diane Brown

Business Fundamentals II (Brown, Summer 2026), with Gaute Soolas and Keith Cotterill

This fall, I'm teaching New AI Tools: A Hands-On Exploration of the Tools and the Societal Impacts with Caitrin Lynch, and Human Computer Interaction, which builds on the course Andrea Cuadra developed at Olin.

Beyond the classroom, I also taught design thinking and innovation to international master's students in BI Norwegian Business School's Global Innovation Challenge and workshops for visiting educators at Olin's Learning by Design and Summer Studio programs, where I also mentored a faculty team from KAUST. 

These courses span design, business, AI, and engineering, but three threads run through all of them. The first is thinking critically about technology: helping students ask not only what a tool can do, but what it should do, who it serves, and the tradeoffs we make when using it. The second is design principles learned by applying them. In the classes at both Olin and Brown, the learning is applied: students build real prototypes, interfaces, and business cases, so they leave with both a deeper grasp of design and portfolio-ready work.The third is understanding people: learning to listen to users, see the world from their perspective, and design with empathy.

This year has also given me the chance to think hard about how design itself is changing with AI. When AI tools can generate concepts, code, and prototypes in seconds, the human parts of design matter more, not less. Framing the right problem, understanding the people you're designing for, and judging what's worth building are where I want my students to grow strongest.

Much of this teaching was collaborative, and I'm grateful to every colleague named above. Olin's co-teaching model and the team-taught courses at Brown meant I learned as much from my co-instructors as my students did from me. I'm looking forward to carrying what this year has taught me into every course that comes next.