Harvard Design Engineering Alumni Ask: How Will AI Change Fashion? @TheHarvardGSD

Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

At the GSD, faculty, students, and alumni are harnessing AI to design systems that address many of the world’s pressing problems.

Global textile waste is projected to reach 150 million tons annually by 2030. Driven by the growth of the fast fashion industry, clothing makes up the bulk of these discarded items, which end up in landfills or incinerators.

As students in the Master in Design Engineering program, offered jointly by the GSD and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Yiqi Yan and Wenbo Zhang (both MDE ’24) used generative AI to reimagine fashion as more sustainable and democratic. Working with Karen Korellis Reuther, GSD design critic in architecture, they developed UpStyle, an image-assisted app that lets users create new garments from preowned clothes—reducing waste and extending the life of one’s wardrobe.

Harvard Design Engineering Alumni Ask: How Will AI Change Fashion?

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$Wheelwright Prize Lecture: Marina Otero Verzier, Feral Clouds Feral Clouds draws on research supported by the Wheelwright Prize to examine the architectures and politics of data processing and storage in a context shaped by technological competition and climate collapse. Bringing together activism, policy work, design prototypes, and educational initiatives, this lecture proposes a reorientation of digital culture away from Cartesian paradigms and market-driven notions of efficiency. Ferality operates here as a lens through which to understand both the excesses of an industry obsessed with winning the AI race at the expense of the planet and the unruly consequences of that obsession. From the residual heat expelled by servers to the destruction embedded in AI supply chains, digital infrastructures generate effects that evade design, control, and prediction. At the same time, “ferality” refers to forms of contestation against this violence, as well as the unintended relationships and material transformations that fracture techno-solutionist imaginaries and give rise to alternative energy cultures. Drawing on sovereign and Indigenous clouds, feminist servers, permaculture imaginaries, and low-tech computation, Otero Verzier outlines speculative yet actionable directions for systems of data storage that embrace limits, decay, and transformation. Speaker: Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. In 2022, she received Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize for a research project on the future of data storage. She is a Lecturer in Architecture at the GSD and has led the Data Mourning clinic at Columbia University’s GSAPP Otero has collaborated with the Supercomputing Center of the DIPC to develop alternative models for data storage, including Computational Compost, awarded by Ars Electronica and the Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2025. She was invited by Chile’s Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation to serve as an expert in the development of the country’s first National Data Centers Plan, working alongside local communities affected by extractivism, and she advises governments internationally on data center policies. Previously, Otero was Head of the MA Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven and Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut. She has curated exhibitions at major international venues, including the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Oslo Architecture Triennale, and is the author of En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024) and co-editor of Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and Work, Body, Leisure (2018), among others. 00:00 Introduction by Sarah Whiting 08:06 Lecture by Marina Otero Verzier 54:36 Q+A$

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