Humbi Song is an Assistant Professor and Emerging Architect Fellow at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the intersection of architecture, technology and human-computer interaction. 

She investigates the evolving relationships between human creativity and interactive technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, in the context of broader societal and technological influences on how designs are conceived, created and experienced. In her creative practice, she builds spatial installations to explore these co-creative processes between designers, responsive interactive technologies and AI. These projects often take the form of interactive installations in the public realm that respond dynamically to human presence and movement, serving as playful and poetic explorations of human behaviour and social relationships within the built environment. Her creative practice has been supported by various fellowships and international residencies, including the Loghaven Fellowship, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Digital Stone Project. 

Her current research explores questions surrounding co-design and co-creation with AI and digital fabrication tools that seemingly interact with humans with a degree of agency. Current advances in generative AI offer an opportunity for the discipline to further interrogate how we shape and are shaped by the tools of design, who gets to shape our built environment, and whether we can use AI to increase accessibility to design and “making” practices for community members and non-design professionals. 

Her recent scholarly contributions include pedagogical research on integrating digital AI literacy in architectural education (SIGRADI 2024), a prototype fabrication project of Human-AI collaborative marble sculpting through real-time VR x AI workflows (ACADIA 2024) and new quantitative methods for understanding spatial experiences and spatial memory in airports (ECADE 2022) and urban neighbourhoods (SIGRADI 2022) through wearable biometric technology, the last of which was recognized with the conference’s Research Innovation Award.  

Song has held faculty positions at Harvard GSD, Northeastern University and Wentworth Institute of Technology, where she has taught undergraduate core studios, graduate thesis research studios and seminars in computation, AI, responsive architecture, representation and fabrication. She directs Studio Humbi Song, LLC and previously worked at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Rogers Partners and INVIVIA. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Studies and a Master of Architecture, both from Harvard University.