ETH Zürich

ETH Zürich’s Student Project House (SPH) is a cross-disciplinary maker space where students define their own challenges and build physical and digital prototypes through training, coaching and community formats. The planned collaboration explores how Hybrid Intelligence can be applied to physical making and prototyping, where much of the relevant knowledge is tacit, embodied and difficult to externalize.

The ETH case extends the HI Education Transformation Playbook into a very different setting from traditional classroom-based AI use. In physical making, students continuously move between ideas, materials, prototypes, constraints and new observations.

This makes the case particularly relevant for testing Hybrid Intelligence because AI can support exploration and suggest possible directions, while important decisions still depend on human interpretation of what happens during the actual making process. The manifesto explicitly positions ETH as a test of HI in a domain where tacit and embodied knowledge plays a central role.

The collaboration is planned at two levels.

First, a dedicated workshop will test the framework in practice. Students begin with a macro-FERC cycle to define and develop their project challenge before building starts. The purpose is to make the framing of the project explicit before moving directly into solutions.

During construction, this is followed by a series of mini-FERC checkpoints. At these points, students pause to document the current state of the artifact, reflect on what the prototype reveals in relation to the original frame, generate alternative next steps with AI support, and deliberately commit to the next construction move.

This creates a recurring rhythm of:

Build → Reflect → Explore → Decide → Build again

Second, if the workshop proves useful, the HI mindset and FERC approach can be integrated into SPH’s wider training, coaching and community formats. The intention is therefore to move from a bounded experiment toward a more shared facilitation practice.

The central HI principle is that AI should not simply automate the creative process.

Instead, AI is used to expand the space of possible directions, while students remain responsible for interpreting what they learn through prototyping and deciding which direction to pursue.

FERC provides a simple structure for this:

• Frame: define the challenge and what matters before asking AI for solutions.
• Explore: use AI to generate alternative approaches or next steps.
• Refine: compare those alternatives against what has actually been learned through building and testing.
• Commit: make a deliberate decision about the next move and take responsibility for it.

In the ETH case, FERC is therefore not only used in a chat interaction. It becomes part of the physical project workflow itself.

The ETH case is deliberately exploratory. It tests whether HI principles developed around human–AI interaction can also support creative work where much of the relevant knowledge emerges through materials, physical experimentation and experience.

It also tests an important boundary condition of FERC. If the checkpoints support reflection and better decision-making, they strengthen the case for using HI in physical and creative work. If they become intrusive or overly rigid, that is equally valuable information about how the framework needs to adapt.

The formats are also intended to be iterated together with the student community, meaning that students are treated not only as users of the approach, but as co-designers of the emerging HI practice.

The immediate aim is to test how macro-FERC and mini-FERC can structure physical project work without reducing the openness and experimentation that characterize making.

If successful, the approach could become part of how Student Project House supports projects more broadly: helping students use AI to expand possibilities while keeping human judgment, reflection and responsibility central throughout the process.