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

</aside>

2025

• AIxD announces Open Culture Tech residency in collaboration with Thunderboom Records
• Elena promoted to Communications Lead (whoop whoop)
• AIxDESIGN Festival: On Slow AI takes place from May 1-3, and is a resounding success!
• Ana becomes Graphic Design Lead of AIxDESIGN Festival: On Slow AI
• Archival Images of AI is now available in print!
• Slow AI report is published! Along with 3 zines
• Elena and Ana join the team as interns!

2024

• Ploi’s title is changed to Co-Founder to reflect her influence in the day-to-day functioning of AIxD
• Sofia joins the core team as Fundraising + Copywriting Lead!
• We kick off the Slow AI project to seed alternative narratives for AI (yaay)
• We secured funding from Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie to continue our work for another 6 months! Thank you, Stimuleringsfonds, for keeping us alive
• We’re growing up 🥳 After years of operating undercover, we finally took a leap of faith and registered as a foundation (stichting) in the Netherlands! We hope this will help us nurture a more stable base for our work.
• Fred Wordie built us a super cool website! Finally, a home for us online ❤️
• Since our start, we have burgeoned from a modest Slack group to a global community of 8,000+ practical radicals, from all walks of life. Today, AIxDESIGN stands as a non-profit community making AI work for the rest of us.

2023

• AIxD launches For Hire, beginning to work with other organizations
• Julie Ditetova joins us over the summer as the first-ever AIxDESIGN intern
• In June 2023, Dominika Cupkova joins the team as Communications Lead
• We run <STORY&CODE> program in collaboration with Sublab
• We apply for lots of funding calls but get rejected
• We took some time to re-align our work with what we care about: Started in 2018, AIxD served as a meeting place for a niche group of creatives working at the intersection of creativity, computation, technology & the humanities. Since then, the technological landscape has changed drastically. Situating ourselves again, we feel an urgency for AIxD to take a stronger stance in our point of view, to offer alternative voices to dominant conversations in the AI landscape, and to approach AI from a place that aligns with our values of care, agency, and intention.

2022

• Ploi officially joins as Operations Lead and never leaves <3
• Karina Zavidova supports as Communications Lead
• 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 on 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
• AIxD has its first-ever successful funding application and receives financing from Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie to develop its first one-year program

2021

• We hosted a Kickstarter campaign for our AI ideation cards; it was a success!

Nadia Piet on LinkedIn: It looks like I'm launcing my first ever Kickstarter campaign to raise…

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

Snapshot of Instagram grid on August 2021

Snapshot of Instagram grid on July 2021

2020

• In June, 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 to make it all come together

• Covid lockdown cancels all in-person meet-ups so we begin gathering and meeting online

• In February, Nadia starts the AIxDESIGN Community Slack

How it all started

• Archive of LinkedIn traces