During our livestream today, Eddie M. brought up a great question:
"In the age of AI, how do you justify the learning of App Design and Graphic Design (emphasizing the processes involved in making them) when students know they can just whip up the same things in minutes with AI?"
Would love to hear everyone's thoughts...
I was so excited to talk about this question that I immediately jumped off the livestream to write out my response! Here's my justification:
Design is more than a product. It's about solving real problems for real people.
Sure, it's easy to type a prompt into whatever AI chatbot you want and have it spit out an app or poster to be a quick something to turn in to satisfy a project requirement, but AI isn't taking the time to sit down with your client to understand their wants, their pain points, their branding, etc. You are though!
I assign a lot of projects that have a personal connection to my students in one way or another. I find that they're more invested in being involved in the process if it's something that they care about, which is how, by the end of the school year, I start creating human-centered designers (and the threat of banning them from using Chromebooks if I catch them using AI in my classroom doesn't hurt either! LOL).
So, by reinforcing the idea over and over throughout the year that design is all about problem-solving for your clients (even if your client is yourself!), I turn my students away from relying on AI for design work by proving to them that design requires so much more careful planning than typing a prompt into a generator.
love these thoughts maddison!
the thing i keep coming back to is that ai is very good at high fidelity, and we keep confusing that for high quality.
fidelity is how finished something looks and i would say quality is the decisions underneath it, what belongs, what gets cut, who its actually for etc. and i believe people feel that difference even when they cant name it, which is why i scroll right past an ai generated thumbnail on youtube, and why im suspicious of an event or program if the flyer looks like it took four seconds to make.
i had a student spend three class periods trying to choose the best color for a physical product he was making because we were going to sell it at a farmers market, he knew people were actually going to use it and buy it and that type of thinking and care is what i hope students get in classrooms today - weather they us ai in projects or not.
