From Spaghetti to Substance: Dan Wilson on How Students Learned to Use AI Well.

Almost everyone who teaches design seems to have a first AI memory at the moment, usually some early, slightly embarrassing piece of student work that looked like AI and felt like AI.

It left you unsure whether to praise it or worry about it, and what interests me much more than the memory itself is how far the conversation has travelled since.

Dan Wilson, one of our teachers, has watched that whole journey unfold in the studio, from the clumsy first experiments to the far more considered work students are making now, and when I sat down with him to talk about it I expected a conversation about tools and ended up having one about art school, exploration and what it really means to learn to design.

You'll see from the way Dan talks about all of this, with so much passion and curiosity, exactly why his students love being taught by him.

Jack: When you think about what creative education should feel like, where does your head go?

Dan:

In my head there's this imagined ideal of what an art school is. I know there's a distinction between fine art and graphic design, but when I entered creative education I did a foundation course, where you'd look at everything and think about everything and look for the areas you gravitated towards. It was exploration. Just because you're into one field, can you bring that skill set and that way of thinking to something else, and what interesting things happen when you do? I love that. With the changing of the design industry, and the way people are learning and thinking, I feel like we're putting more focus on ideas and exploration again, and that alleviates a pressure as well. As a student or a designer you're not trying to rush towards some quote unquote perfect design. It's more a case of asking what the big idea is, what the connection is, why it's resonating with me and how I can harness that so it connects with other people too. That's exciting to me.

Jack: So what's changed? Can you remember the first time you saw a student using AI in the studio, what they were using it for and what you thought of it?

Dan:

I can't recall a specific first time, but it's crazy to think about the timeline. Two years ago the obvious thing that comes to mind is that video of Will Smith eating spaghetti, when it was terrible and didn't work. The first time anybody was using AI it probably looked like AI and felt like AI, and there was an element of cheating involved too. Cheating in terms of the historic system of how you design, but also cheating yourself, because as a student you denied yourself the opportunity to explore and dig deeper and research and have those eureka moments. What's changed now is that people are using AI far more critically and analytically, and thinking about the actual purpose of using it, so there's more substance to it.

Jack: I remember sitting next to you on the sofa in London while you showed me a zine you'd made with AI. Where did that come from?

Dan:

We were doing a zine workshop about lyrics, and I chose John Lennon's Imagine. I loved the idea of something so fundamentally human and juxtaposing it by creating the imagery with AI, so I was trying to capture this idea of peace and love through the lens of noughts and ones. To be honest, even though it was early days for AI, the results were really good.

Jack: But you messed with them a bit, didn't you?

Dan:

Yeah, I filtered them through the lens of my own lived experience and personal taste and the technology that was around me, printing them out on relatively shoddy printers and then photocopying them. So, a bit like sampling in music, they ended up two steps removed from the original and became something else, and that was exciting. It's the same when students use AI well. Like any tool, it's about not using AI for AI's sake. It's about asking how it elevates the idea, how it pushes it further and how it visualises something in a way that's engaging. That's where the power is.

What stays with me from talking to Dan is that none of this is really a story about AI at all, or at least not only about AI.

The thing he gets most excited about is the same thing that excited him on his foundation course, which is the freedom to look at everything, follow what you're drawn to and see what happens when you carry a way of thinking somewhere it doesn't obviously belong.

If the arrival of these tools ends up nudging design education back towards that kind of exploration, and away from the pressure to arrive quickly at something polished and perfect, then I think the students coming through our studio right now might end up with a richer education than many of us had, which seems to me a pretty hopeful place to be.