Thomas J. McLeish

Thomas J. McLeish is a Lecturer in the Master of Design program at UC Berkeley and at California College of the Arts, where he teaches graduate courses in AI prototyping and emerging design practices. At UC Berkeley, he serves on the Jacobs Institute Executive Committee's AI working group, shaping how the Institute integrates AI across its design programs. An MIT Media Lab alumnus, he was shaped by Nicholas Negroponte's vision of responsive, conversational systems and by Gordon Pask's cybernetic idea that intelligent systems should engage users in dialogue rather than deliver static responses. His reconstruction of Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles—exhibited at the Centre Pompidou and now in the permanent collection at ZKM—extends that lineage into contemporary practice.

Thomas's teaching positions students as authors, not consumers, of AI: building agentic systems, RAG pipelines, and multimodal prototypes as a way to develop literacy in a rapidly shifting design material. He has consulted on applied AI and RAG systems for the Dubberly Design Office, led workshops on AI literacy at Kingston University, EPICpeople, and the American Society of Cybernetics, and developed prototyping curricula used by hundreds of students across multiple institutions. His current focus is the changing shape of design practice itself—what designers actually do when the medium is AI—and how that practice gets shared, in workplaces and in classrooms.