It was December 2011 when then UB junior architecture student Shawn Chiki sat alone in a Hayes Hall computer lab, experimenting with the latest tools in digital design. With final reviews over, he fell down a rabbit hole as he played with a mysterious new feature in Adobe Photoshop called “content-aware-delete.” The earliest version of a “smart” image editing tool, the prompt allowed users to remove sections of an image and then seamlessly blend the area with nearby pixels, patterns, and colors.

Chiki quickly discovered the new feature made a lot of “mistakes.” Pixels and colors would mix in strange ways, running into one another as they buffered in search of the “correct” matrix. He picked the glitches he liked and strung them into larger, more detailed patterns. Repeating the process enough times resulted in an almost hypnotic series of digital coastlines and landscapes.  

While he might not have known it at the time, Chiki was onto something. On one level, he was playing with the rapidly evolving world of new media and 'glitch art.' On another, he had slipped into the emergent and surprisingly beautiful territory of generative AI.

Says Chiki: “To the computer, it was just a simple cause-and-effect between visual pattern recognition and pixel generation. But I began to see it as a conversation between the machine and me. I've always gotten excited by steering the machine towards mistakes and watching a mysterious ‘black box’ algorithm generate infinite surprises. It was this kind of playful experimentation that led me to stumble into now-relevant techniques like ‘out-painting’ that have since become commonplace in our approach to creating with generative AI.”

Today, the designer and multi-media artist is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Architecture, where he teaches a series of exploratory courses in creative generative AI.

His teaching experience at UB began in Fall 2020, when Chiki was invited by Joyce Hwang, professor in the Department of Architecture, to host a workshop in AI. The 2013 BS Arch graduate was just coming out of a deep period of experimentation with multi-media art and music, producing interactive installations, exhibitions and electronic music performances. When that all came to a screeching halt due to the pandemic, Chiki decided it was time to change course. 

“I knew I wanted to get into teaching 3D-related arts and tech, but I wasn't sure how to move forward with any of it. Joyce became the voice of encouragement I needed. I still get giddy when I realize I am teaching alongside my mentors and favorite faculty," he says.

Looking back, Chiki speaks fondly of his time as an architecture student at UB. “I cannonballed into the deep end of studio culture. I loved the challenge, the immersion, the process. I enjoyed art classes at UB’s Center for the Arts, as well, but identified more with the rigor demanded from architecture as a discipline.”

For his senior studio with Clinical Assistant Professor Brad Wales, Chiki created “Parkour Manor,” imagining a standard apartment building as a giant, scalable playscape. “Brad was the perfect mix between imagining playful ideas that ultimately could be built,” says Chiki.

Then there was Nick Bruscia, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, who has closely studied vernacular architecture in Japan. In 2012, Chiki enrolled in Bruscia’s Japan study abroad program, investigating the post-WWII Metabolist Movement and its imaginings of super-futuristic, organically evolving megacities.

Hadas Steiner, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and an architectural historian, taught Chiki and his fellow classmates about Archigram, an avant-garde and highly influential British architectural group from the 1960s that conceived of a Neofuturistic, anti-heroic architecture. Much like the origin story of the School of Architecture and Planning, founded in 1969, they drew inspiration from the sociocultural and technological orders of the time, seeking to create a new reality via hypothetical, and often psychedelic, projects.

“I was like, ‘Okay – THAT! I want to do that,’” says Chiki.

Interestingly, today he is closer than ever before - and taking future designers along for the ride.  

In the classroom, students appreciate Chiki’s infectious enthusiasm and the opportunity to sit at the cusp of human-machine bridged creativity, where AI is amplified by human sensibility, imagination, and originality.

At the start of the Spring 2025 semester, Chiki invited students in his ARC333 class to share questions and big ideas they would like to explore through the course:

• “How can I use AI to make a new creature?”
•  “I’m curious about using AI for parametric design and VR-to-AI generation.”
•  “I’m interested in quantum computing as an alternative to crypto.”
•  “What if AI could help us design a skatepark of perpetual motion. It would know how to create the right curves and organic volumes to ensure you never lose speed.”
• “What are AI applications in city design and urban planning?”

As they dove into the content, students worked with AI applications like image-generator Midjourney, the Chat GPT LLM, and Luma AI, a 3D model generator, dreaming up creations for Baroque chairs, future building materials and ornamental architectural possibilities.

Based on the students' prompts, the AI tools generate a series of images that seem to pull from the depths of this newfound world of IoT. They are wonkily abstract, futuristically plausible.

They learn to ideate, variate, and blend their ideas with AI, curating the first batch of images with finer-grained prompts and more precise directions for a spatial vision. For instance, one student’s “playground that looks like wild animals” ended up as a pink grizzly bear that could be explored from within and exited by way of its tongue. Another took a series of Pop Art themed patterns on an “occupiable structure” to create a chair.

The class presented some of their work at the School’s Open Studio 2025 exhibition, with their schematics of image progressions revealing a sort of human-machine neural network. Their series of 3D-printed ornamental wall hooks included a large-nosed face, sharp-clawed dragons, a pickup truck with an oversized hitch, and birds with curved beaks and sinewy feet.

But take note, says Chiki: this isn’t child’s play. "In fact, AI can transform design by opening us up to amazing, accidental worlds."

For instance, one of his exercises for ARC333 was to have students ask Midjourney to ‘make a sculptural piece of furniture – without using words associated with furniture!' "Many of the resulting images were 'off,'' admits Chiki. "But many were interesting mistakes that took us to new places. If creation is now curation, it's on us humans to find ‘errors’ and say, ‘that's different, yet somehow it works,’ and then expand from there. Fully automated workflows would pass this by."

Chiki is also working with another rapidly emerging space for design and the built environment - virtual reality. In a recent graduate seminar on VR sketching, he and Randy Fernando, adjunct instructor in the Department of Architecture, combined analog and digital tools to create a heady, immersive space for drawing. In one lesson, students used VR goggles to hover over a drone-captured image of Hayes Hall and imagine new futures for the iconic UB building. Perhaps with fluorescent flairs hanging from the clock tower, or cubic additions extending from the rectilinear wings. It is a liberating – judgment-free – way of drawing.

When probed about “buildability,” Chiki says that will come - as it always does - when it's right.

“Penicillin, Post-It Notes and even microwaves were accidents,” he says. “So much of architecture, engineering, and technology that is today ubiquitous once was considered ‘unbuildable.' We should always imagine potential futures so we can anticipate and steer them in a better direction.”

“Architecture is a form of storytelling through the design of experiences," continues Chiki. "When architects come up with good stories, they usually get built.”

Next Fall, Chiki will be joining SCI ARC in Los Angeles, a renowned center for architectural experimentation, to pursue graduate study and explore worldbuilding for film, visual effects, video games and new forms of creative practice. “I’m looking forward to pushing the limits of this field even further,” says Chiki.

Trust us, we’ll be following this alumnus. Let’s give thanks to Shawn Chiki and his dedication to our students and insatiable curiosity for new possibilities.