A Subconference of the World Design Cities Conference
Shanghai · September 26–29, 2026
Every discipline now confronts the same recursive problem: AI systems are redesigning the people who are supposed to govern them. This conference refuses to treat that as a technical puzzle with a technical solution. Instead, we ask a design question — how do we draw boundaries that respect what only humans can do?
Hosted within the World Design Cities Conference, this three-day subconference brings together complexity scientists, philosophers of mind, AI researchers, educators, and a playwright to hold that question in dialogue. No paper sessions. No panel presentations. Only structured conversation — Buberian dialogues, keynote exchanges, and AI-augmented working groups — designed to produce insight that no single discipline could reach alone.
The intellectual engine is the concept of the AI Dramaturg: the recognition that every discipline has a dramaturgical function — the framing, staging, and interpretation of its own questions — that AI can partially supply but cannot replace. The irreducible remainder is situated human judgment.
Beneath that boundary lies a question about reasoning itself — about abduction, the act of deciding which explanation is worth reaching for. A model surveys an enormous field at once and weighs relevance in a single currency, learned similarity across everything in view: comprehensive, but flat. A person works from a small foreground, steered by something the model lacks — affect, bodily salience, the trained feel for what matters that can reframe a problem on a basis no text contains. A model can make the products of that judgment legible; it cannot perform the judgment. Drawing that line is the work of these three days.
In theater, the dramaturg is the person who holds the intellectual architecture of a production — researching context, questioning choices, ensuring coherence. The dramaturg doesn't direct, doesn't act, doesn't write. The dramaturg holds the space in which meaning is made.
AI is becoming every discipline's dramaturg. It can retrieve, synthesize, pattern-match, and propose — reasoning, in effect, over a learned surrogate of human practice. But it cannot make the situated judgment that transforms information into understanding. This conference asks: where exactly is that boundary, and how do we design systems that respect it?
The 26th opens with filmed provocations, Harry Collins's keynote, and a reciprocal Buberian trialogue; the DesignX working sessions then run across the 26th and 27th, building the takeaway with GraspingAI, and on the 28th the conversation reaches the WDCC main stage on the Bund.
For half a century, Harry Collins has been the definitive voice on what knowledge resists being made explicit. His work on tacit knowledge, expertise, and the sociology of scientific knowledge is the ground on which this conference's central question stands: what can a machine be told, and what can it never be told? His keynote opens the first day.
Invitations are extended to the scholars, designers, and artists below; the roster will firm as acceptances arrive.
Three protagonists engage through a facilitator. Distinguished listeners respond. The audience makes meaning. No debate — genuine encounter. The format is designed to produce insight that neither monologue nor panel discussion can reach.
Two thinkers, one question, one hour. Not a lecture followed by Q&A — a structured intellectual exchange in which both participants are changed by the conversation. The audience witnesses thinking in real time.
Participants receive access to three curated research corpora and a custom interface combining Claude and NotebookLM. Groups use AI as dramaturg — retrieval, synthesis, pattern-matching — while humans supply the judgment that turns information into insight.
The conference is co-hosted by Shanghai University of Engineering Science (SUES) and Tongji University, situated in one of the world's great design cities. Shanghai's position at the intersection of Eastern and Western intellectual traditions makes it the natural home for a conversation about designing AI's boundaries.
The opening two days take place on campus — one at Tongji University's College of Design and Innovation, one at Shanghai University of Engineering Science. On 28 September the subconference moves to the WDCC main stage at the Convention Center Riverside, on the Bund, for the afternoon, and the closing day returns to campus. The assignment of specific days to Tongji and SUES is being finalized.
This conference is by invitation and application. We are seeking participants from design, complexity science, philosophy of mind, AI research, education, and the arts who want to spend three days thinking carefully about the boundaries between human and machine intelligence. No paper submissions required — bring your questions.
Apply to ParticipateApplications reviewed on a rolling basis.
For inquiries, contact Michael Lissack at michael.lissack@gmail.com
A companion theory issue of She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation is in development, titled "The AI Dramaturg." The issue will explore the conference's central proposition: that AI's role across disciplines is best understood through the dramaturgical metaphor — and that the irreducible human contribution lies in the situated judgment that no model can replicate.
Participants in the conference's AI-augmented working groups will have the opportunity to develop contributions for this issue, supported by the same research infrastructure available during the conference itself.