Personal AI Companions: Agency, Intimacy, and Social Reasoning

Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to research labs or technical infrastructure—it is embedded in classrooms, creative practice, healthcare systems, communication platforms, and planetary-scale infrastructures. As AI systems move from experimental tools to everyday companions, decision-makers, and mediators of social life, the question is no longer whether AI will shape our future, but how—and by whom.

At the Design Lab, we approach AI not simply as an algorithmic achievement, but as a fundamentally human-centered design challenge. Intelligent systems must be technically robust, yet responsive to lived experience; powerful at scale, yet grounded in context; innovative, yet attentive to equity and responsibility. Across seven sessions, Design@Large in Spring 2026 brings together leading voices from research, industry, education, law, health, and the arts to explore how AI is designed, deployed, governed, and experienced in real-world settings. From generative AI in education and music to embodied intelligence in XR, from disability justice and communication to sustainable computing and Indigenous data sovereignty, and from personal AI companions to value-based care in health systems, the series examines AI where it meets people, institutions, and infrastructures.

Rather than treating AI as a purely technical system, we frame it as a site of negotiation among human values, institutional incentives, cultural norms, and material conditions. Each session pairs scholars, practitioners, and industry leaders to interrogate how design decisions shape agency, creativity, trust, access, and care at scale.

Design@Large is open to the broader public and livestreamed online, while also serving as a core seminar for over 100 undergraduate and graduate students at UC San Diego. Together, we ask: What does it mean to design AI responsibly? How do we ensure that intelligent systems amplify human capability without reproducing harm? And how can design guide AI toward more just, inclusive, and sustainable futures?

As AI systems increasingly act as companions, collaborators, and conversational partners, they begin to occupy emotionally and socially meaningful roles. This session brings together effective computing, interactive agent design, and deployed personal AI systems to examine how machines simulate social reasoning, rapport, and presence. The discussion explores how agency is negotiated between humans and AI, how intimacy is engineered, and how people interpret and respond to systems designed to feel socially intelligent.

Gale M. Lucas is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Southern California (USC). She is appointed in the Civil Engineering, Computer Science, and Psychology departments, and works at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). She obtained her PhD in psychology from Northwestern University, and then completed a post-doc at USC in computer science. She stayed on at ICT as a senior researcher before becoming faculty. Dr. Lucas works in the areas of human-computer interaction, affective computing, and trust-in-automation.

Suman Kanuganti

Raj Ammanabrolu

https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/92833047954?pwd=mzHFwYqUWbg0KJbcTqYov65C6TY3Wa.1

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