Designing for What’s Next: Antonio Bailon Borja on AI, Craft, and the Future of Industrial Design

Academy of Art University’s Executive Director of Industrial Design speaks with Autodesk about preparing designers to navigate AI, emerging technology, and an evolving automotive industry.

The tools designers use are changing faster than ever. Artificial intelligence can generate and visualize ideas in minutes. Digital workflows continue to accelerate. And industries from automotive design to consumer products are rethinking not only what gets designed, but how—and by whom.

For Antonio Bailon Borja, Executive Director of the School of Industrial Design at Academy of Art University, those changes make one thing increasingly important: designers still need to understand why they are designing something in the first place.

Borja recently sat down with Autodesk Design Studio for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of design education, revisiting many of the ideas he first discussed with Autodesk several years ago against a dramatically different technological backdrop. The new conversation explores how Academy students are learning to embrace emerging tools while maintaining the critical thinking, craft, empathy, and sense of purpose at the heart of effective design.

New Tools, Same Fundamental Question

AI has dramatically accelerated the early stages of the design process. Students can now generate, iterate, and visualize ideas at a speed that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

For Borja, however, speed does not eliminate the need for judgment. It makes judgment more important.

He argues that designers should use emerging technology to “amplify our creativity, not replace it.”

A polished image can be produced quickly. Determining whether the idea behind that image makes sense is another matter.

Throughout the design process, Borja pushes students to ask a deceptively simple question: “Why should I care about your concept?”

That question forces designers to look beyond aesthetics. Who is the design for? What problem does it solve? Why is this solution appropriate? How does it improve an experience or respond to a real need?

Those questions become particularly significant when technology makes it easier than ever to produce something that looks convincing before the underlying concept has been fully considered.

That is one reason traditional design fundamentals—including sketching, modeling, and prototyping—continue to play an important role in the School of Industrial Design. They are not simply techniques for creating a final presentation. They are ways of thinking through problems and discovering whether an idea actually works.

Designing for the World as It Is

The Academy’s San Francisco location places students in close proximity to a culture of rapid technological innovation. But Borja emphasizes the importance of understanding that the newest idea is not automatically the most useful one.

Designers have to consider the people, cultures, infrastructure, and environments in which their work will exist.

In his conversation with Autodesk, Borja describes encouraging students to look beyond their own assumptions when developing a project. A transportation solution that makes sense in one city, for example, may be completely inappropriate somewhere else.

One student project examined mobility in densely populated parts of Southeast Asia where waterways are central to everyday transportation. Rather than imposing a familiar road-based solution, the students explored concepts shaped by the geography, congestion, infrastructure, and established patterns of movement already present there.

The lesson extends far beyond transportation design: innovation is most meaningful when it responds to the lives people actually live.

Turning Ideas Into Finished Design

Generating possibilities is only part of the process.

Borja describes the early stages of student projects as intentionally expansive. Students explore broadly, challenge assumptions, combine ideas, and push concepts in unexpected directions.

Eventually, however, exploration has to give way to decision-making.

Students must determine what they are actually making, organize their presentations, define deliverables, and carry the strongest ideas forward.

For talented students who can see countless ways to improve a project, knowing when to make that transition can be difficult. Borja offers a practical reminder: “Completion is more important than perfection.”

Professional designers do not simply generate compelling possibilities. They have to communicate an idea, develop it, test it, respond to feedback, and ultimately deliver something that can exist beyond a sketch or rendering.

That emphasis on execution is reinforced through Academy of Art University’s collaborations with industry partners, which give students opportunities to work with professional briefs and receive feedback from specialists throughout the design process. Recent projects highlighted by Autodesk include collaborations and student work involving Cadillac, Lucid, Under Armour, CamelBak, and the Autodesk Student Design Competition.

Rethinking the Automotive Designer

The changing design landscape is also creating a broader range of career possibilities.

Students interested in automotive design may initially imagine a traditional career path centered on becoming the person responsible for the exterior or overall vision of a vehicle. But modern automotive design depends on a much larger ecosystem of specialists.

Interior designers, color-material-finish specialists, clay modelers, digital modelers, interaction designers, visualization experts, and others all contribute to taking an idea from its earliest stages to a finished vehicle.

Borja wants students to understand those possibilities early.

That perspective is reinforced through direct interaction with professionals across the industry. Rather than seeing the initial sketch as the culmination of automotive design, students learn to see it as the beginning of a much longer collaborative process.

Autodesk highlights Academy alumnus Santiago Bastidas as an example of where that process can lead. After previously presenting work at Pebble Beach as a student, Bastidas later returned as part of the professional team behind Cadillac’s Elevated Velocity concept—a transition from student designer to industry contributor in the same high-profile environment.

Preparing Designers for Change

Technology will continue to evolve. The tools students use five years from now may look very different from those they use today.

But Borja’s approach suggests that preparing designers for that uncertainty does not mean trying to predict every new tool. It means giving students the ability to think critically regardless of the tool in front of them.

They need to understand people and context. They need the craft to explore and communicate ideas. They need the judgment to distinguish a visually impressive concept from a meaningful one. And they need the ability to carry an idea beyond its initial spark and turn it into something that works.

AI can make parts of that process dramatically faster.

The responsibility for deciding what is worth making still belongs to the designer.

Read Autodesk Design Studio’s full feature and listen to the complete conversation with Antonio Bailon Borja to hear more about how Academy of Art University is educating designers for a new era.

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