This is not mine! Exploring the Challenges, Metaphors, and Affordances of Generative AI in Design Education
This very exciting instance of the TeLEd Monthly Event Series will feature André Mestre. André is a researcher and artist exploring the intersections of creativity, technology, and learning. He is currently a PhD fellow at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology (SLATE) at the University of Bergen, where he investigates how emerging technologies such as generative AI and virtual reality are reshaping higher education. He has published in the fields of creativity research and music. In 2021 he was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology.
This talk reports on a think-aloud study conducted with design teachers in Norway who are actively grappling with the rapid emergence of generative AI in their classrooms and professional practices. We examine how text-to-image systems such as Midjourney are destabilizing long-standing assumptions about creativity, authorship, and the nature of teaching in creative disciplines. Throughout the talk, we will explore several key themes that emerged from the study: how educators draw on metaphor to make sense of generative AI; how these tools intervene in and reshape the creative process; the perceived risks of overreliance and deskilling; and the new challenges these tools pose for assessment and evaluation. I will also introduce the concept of mediation anxiety—the discomfort educators experience when creative agency becomes visibly shared between human and machine. The talk will conclude with a broader reflection on creativity itself. Rather than seeing generative AI as an external disruption to an otherwise stable process, we will examine how, from a socio-cultural perspective, creativity has always been mediated by tools, practices, and cultural resources. What generative AI makes newly visible is the fundamentally ecological and distributed nature of creative action.