Gerd Kortuem

I build and study agentic AI systems for design.

Professor at TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering

Agentic design is my term for AI systems that carry out meaningful work over many steps, with ambiguous goals, and without being instructed at every moment. My current work spans design, education, and software development, all built and used in deep human-AI collaboration.

Current work

Design

Agentic design. Can AI agents tackle ill-defined design briefs autonomously, and how does their design process compare with human designers? I am building and benchmarking autonomous design agents around simulated design problems.
Context-driven agentic systems. I build agentic systems where the intelligence sits in documents, not in code. The AI reads structured frameworks and applies them to raw material to produce structured output. To change what the system does, you edit a document.

Education

AI-driven course development. Agentic workflows for planning, building, testing, and delivering university coursework, treating teaching materials like software.
Diagnosing AI risk in education. An agentic system that imports raw course materials and diagnoses where assessments are exposed to undetected AI use. Four pilot courses analysed so far.

Practice

Auto-ethnography of AI collaboration. Analysing my own AI work logs to understand long-term human-AI working patterns: who leads, who defers, how the collaboration evolves.
Writing and publishing with AI. Developing a deep collaborative practice for how I write and communicate my work with AI.

This work feeds into my research and teaching at TU Delft, where I am Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. I teach Intelligent Products and Generative AI and Design.

Interested in any of this? Email me at g.w.kortuem@tudelft.nl.