A Focus on Pedagogy 2026

Across Teaching, Theory, Technologies & Times

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Strand Call: Professional Education in the Age of AI – Redefining Creativity, Ethics, and Interdisciplinarity

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This strand is interested in how AI continues to transform both how we live and how we teach and learn. It is specifically interested in these questions in the context of the built environment but many of its concerns stretch across disciplines.

How the design and history of the built environment is studied, designed, and governed is facing the challenge of defining a “new foundational literacy.” Concerns include the erosion of creativity and imagination among beginners who rely too heavily on AI-generated output, as well as the emergence of a new digital divide driven by unequal access to advanced tools.

At the same time, AI might be democratizing access to open data and analytical resources, expanding opportunities for diverse actors—including non-experts—to participate in built environment design, planning and conservation. The same can be said of many other disciplines including the health sector, the arts, cultural studies and social and political policy.

This strand will revisit the design of teaching materials and exercises in professional education disciplines like the built environment, re-examining the very purpose of the university—not merely as a site of knowledge transmission, but as a place where students learn to formulate critical questions, envision new forms of society, and translate them into tangible spaces.

Expected Outcomes include sharing and co-creating a forward-looking and inclusive vision of the future across both educational settings and civil society, leading to concrete proposals for curricula, collaborative research, and practical implementation. Exploring integrative approaches to the design of cyber and physical spaces, presenting urban and related professional futures that prioritize diversity and freedom over dystopian, surveillance-oriented scenarios.

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Chuo University, Tokyo

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Chuo University was founded in 1885, in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration. Dedicated to the cause of Fostering the Ability to Apply Knowledge to Practice, the founders believed that studying common law, which was closely intertwined with the social reality, would be more useful in nurturing individuals who would be ideally suited to modern society. With this goal in mind, they poured their energy and resources into legal education.

In the space of only two years, the initial student body of 97 people had grown to over 600. In 1889, the year the Meiji Constitution was ratified, the school moved from the old samurai residence it had inhabited to a stylish new two-story brick building.

In 1918 the school changed its legal status from a corporation to a foundation in response to the University Order. In 1920, Chuo University was accredited under the Order, and the Faculties of Law, Economics, and Commerce, a graduate school, and college preparatory courses were established, all of which came together to constitute a university under the old, pre-war education system.

Today, Chuo University has partnership agreements with 219 colleges, universities and education organizations in 41 countries and regions worldwide. Chuo has also won funding from Japan’s Ministry of Education for the Promotion of Global Human Resource Development Project, 2012-2016. Under this framework, Chuo is increasing partnerships with institutions worldwide, as well as developing overseas offices and new exchange opportunities for Japanese and foreign students in Japan and overseas.

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