<aside> 📍 This page is a chronological and incomplete retelling of the evolution of AIxDESIGN.

</aside>

2024

Thanks to funding from Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industrie Digital Culture, we kick off the Slow AI project in which we seed alternative narratives for AI yaayyy
AIxD invested in officially registering as a non-profit foundation in The Netherlands - we’re growing up now 🥳
- 22/03/2024 - We’re now a foundation!
- 28/01/2024 - We got funding from Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industrie to continue our work for another 6 months
Fred Wordie built us a super cool website! Finally a home for us online <3
Since our birth, we have burgeoned from a modest Slack group to a global network of over 8,000 computationally-curious individuals, from all cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Today, AIxDesign stands as an autonomous, non-profit, open community committed to critical AI design (research) for the rest of us.

AIoAI week 2.gif

2023

We apply to and write lots of funding applications but get rejected
Run <STORY&CODE> program in collaboration with Sublab
In June 2023, Dominika Cupkova joins the team as social media + comms lead
Julie Ditetova joins us over the summer as the first ever AIxDESIGN intern
AIxD launches For Hire - beginning to work with organizations as a network
We took some time out in 2023 to re-align the work with what we care about. Initially started in 2018, AIxD served as a meeting place for niche group of creatives working at the intersections of creativity & computation, and technology & humanities. Since then, the landscape has changed drastically with rapid technological advancement and adoption. Situating ourselves again and questioning what we want our role to be within this new environment, we feel a strong urgency for AIxD to take a stronger stance in our point of view, to offer alternative voices to the dominant conversations in the AI landscape at the moment, and to approach AI from a place that aligns with our values of care, agency, and intention.

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AIxD has its first succesful funding application ever and receives funding from Stimuleringsfonds Digital Culture to develop its first one-year program
This allowed us to invite members to join the team and run our first year-long series of programs and community-led research projects
- in AI playground, we hosted AI-focused “how-to” workshops for creatives and designers and published how-to guides generative creative AI tools like AIxD’s Guide to: AI-generated Music and Sound
- in AI&Design Cartography we experimented with decentralised and participatory research approaches to map the emerging field of AI and Design
- in Data (H)activism we convened social scientists, data scientists, and artists to dream up everyday tactics to combat AI oppression
Karina Zavidova supports as comms lead
Ploi officially joins as community lead and never leaves <3
We write an end of the year report - officially for reporting of our Stimuleringsfonds grant but it’s pretty cute so we’re adding it here:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ogIz2d4B_EHkLhdXLS07xeEr04RWsy5YBF5rsCVYPXQ/edit#slide=id.g2494455869d_0_65

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Nadia works together with Design Systems International to develop an upgraded visual identity which we continue to use to this day
Nadia & Ploi connect and start having lots of calls around AI, design, anti-racism, community building, and how to stay sane & inspired during lockdown
This leads to our first official collab - researching design approaches to non-discriminatory AI products for the UK’s ICO

Snapshot of Instagram grid on August 2021

Snapshot of Instagram grid on July 2021

In February, Nadia opens the AIxDESIGN Community Slack. Covid lockdown cancels all in-person meet-ups so we begin gathering and meeting online
In June 2020, we began hosting public gatherings

AIxDESIGN on Instagram: "Thank you to everyone that joined our first AI x Design community meet! 🚀 Over 15 people joined with backgrounds ranging from anthropology, business, data science, software dev, to UX design. Calling in from all corners of the world from Mumbai to Colorado, Amsterdam to Stockholm. We had an amazing time meeting eachother, hearing about everyone's practice, and generated so much potential to collaborate in such a short time! For those who missed out, @alksgrtz and @ julie did a little write up on the #1 meet and how this community came to be on our Medium (link in bio) to catch you up 💫"
Over the next year, we hosted 15 online events with over 1200 participants from around the world and shared recordings of 6 talks on Youtube, hosted 3 online hands-on workshops, wrote 23 articles which got 11000 views, sent 13 newsletters to 1237 subscribers, welcomed 194 passionate members into our Slack channel, created a resource library with 438 bookmarks, made 1000+ social media posts to share inspirational projects, educational podcasts / courses, explainers of fundamental concepts, and had 28+ team meetings of 2 hours each to make it all come together

How it all started

Snapshot of Instagram grid on April 2021

Snapshot of Instagram grid on September 2020

There were designers & artists sprinkled around the world - scrolling through dev repos, experimenting with AI, questioning algorithmic affordances on their own
When Nadia Piet launched the AI meets Design toolkit in 2019, it served as bat signal for this community to slowly congregate around shared interests and questions