Tag: experiential learning

Generative AI for Visual Communication: Designing Human-Centered, AI-First Pedagogy

An introduction to foundational concepts such as training data, bias, authorship, and algorithmic influence.

Adonis Durado
Associate Professor
Ohio University

VICO 3456 / VICO 5456: Generative AI for Visual Communication is a vertically integrated studio course that brings together undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students in a shared learning environment. Designed as a yoke course, it intentionally collapses traditional academic hierarchies to create a collaborative space where emerging and advanced designers learn alongside one another. The course reimagines how artificial intelligence can be taught within design education by positioning AI not as a shortcut or productivity tool, but as a collaborative system that reshapes authorship, decision-making, and creative responsibility.

The course was developed in response to a widening gap between the rapid adoption of generative technologies in professional practice and the limited pedagogical frameworks available to support meaningful learning with them. Students often encounter AI informally through social media or commercial platforms, without guidance on ethical, cultural, or conceptual implications. By bringing undergraduate and graduate students together, the course leverages varied levels of experience and disciplinary perspectives while modeling how learning communities function in professional and research contexts.

At its core, the course is grounded in the belief that meaningful engagement with AI requires intentional design and critical awareness. Students work with generative image, video, and multimodal tools while examining how these systems shape authorship, aesthetics, and power. Early modules introduce foundational concepts such as training data, bias, authorship, and algorithmic influence. These shared conceptual anchors allow students at different academic stages to engage in layered ways, contributing diverse insights while working toward common learning goals.

Instruction is structured around three scaffolded projects that move from exploration to authorship to public-facing communication. Early projects emphasize experimentation and inquiry, allowing students to test tools within defined constraints while observing their limitations. Subsequent projects demand increasing conceptual clarity, ethical reasoning, and intentional design decisions. Graduate students are challenged to operate at a meta-level, articulating frameworks and critiques, while undergraduate students build foundational fluency and confidence through guided practice. This vertical integration fosters mentorship, peer learning, and shared accountability across experience levels.

The culmination of the course is a public exhibition titled Generative Sparks, which serves as both a learning milestone and a platform for community engagement. The exhibition features work developed across all three major projects and invites audiences to reflect on authorship, ethics, and creativity in the age of generative AI. By situating student work in a public context, the exhibition reinforces professional standards and positions students as contributors to broader cultural conversations around emerging technology.

Reflection functions as a central design practice throughout the course. Students regularly document their processes through written and visual reflections that examine how AI influences their thinking, choices, and creative identity. These reflections support metacognition and allow students to trace their evolving relationship with generative tools. Peer critique further deepens this process by encouraging dialogue across experience levels, fostering a studio culture grounded in mutual learning and critical exchange.

Pedagogically, the course integrates experiential learning, studio critique, and inquiry-based practice. Students learn through cycles of making, testing, revising, and reflecting. Guided constraints prevent overreliance on automation and encourage engagement with the affordances and limitations of generative systems. Faculty guidance emphasizes authorship, accountability, and ethical responsibility, reinforcing that AI-generated work remains a human-centered practice shaped by values and intent.

A significant outcome of the course is a shift in student mindset. Many enter viewing AI as either a threat to creativity or a shortcut to production. Over time, students develop a more nuanced understanding of human–AI collaboration, recognizing both its possibilities and its limitations. This shift is evident in reflective writing, process documentation, and increasingly sophisticated visual outcomes that demonstrate intentionality rather than automation.

The course has produced strong and visible outcomes. Students generate portfolio-ready work that demonstrates conceptual depth, technical experimentation, and reflective authorship. Projects have been exhibited publicly through Generative Sparks and shared in academic and professional contexts. Students report increased confidence navigating emerging technologies, and many leverage coursework for internships, interdisciplinary collaborations, and advanced research.

Beyond individual outcomes, VICO 3456/5456 functions as a transferable pedagogical model. Its structure, assignments, and assessment strategies have informed broader curricular conversations around AI literacy, ethical design, and experiential learning. By bringing undergraduate and graduate students into a shared learning environment, the course models how design education can cultivate mentorship, complexity, and critical engagement across levels of expertise.

Ultimately, VICO 3456/5456 positions design education as a space for intentional experimentation rather than technological reaction. Through its vertically integrated structure and the public-facing exhibition Generative Sparks, the course demonstrates how educators can guide students to engage emerging technologies thoughtfully, creatively, and responsibly within contemporary design practice.

Durado_Documentation__Evidence

Biography

Adonis Durado is an Associate Professor in the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University, where he teaches design, storytelling, and generative AI–driven creative practice. His work centers on human-centered pedagogy, ethical technology use, and the thoughtful integration of emerging tools into design education. He developed one of the university’s first AI-first courses, positioning generative systems as collaborators in learning rather than replacements for human judgment. His teaching emphasizes reflection, authorship, and critical inquiry, preparing students to engage creative technologies with intention, accountability, and agency. Durado’s pedagogy bridges theory and practice through experiential, project-based learning and community engagement. His work has contributed to curricular innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of AI literacy frameworks in design education. He is also an award-winning designer and writer whose research explores authorship, visual culture, and the cultural implications of artificial intelligence.


This project was the 2025 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner-up recipient in the category of Teaching.

Working with Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships

A practical guide to working on client and community work in the design studio.

Meaghan Dee
Associate Professor
Virginia Tech

Jessica Meharry
Visiting Assistant Professor
Institute of Design at Illinois Tech

Working with Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships is a book for design students and educators seeking to integrate real-world client projects into their curriculum. Born from extensive research, interviews, and the authors’ years of experience running a successful student-run design studio, this book offers practical advice, tools, and frameworks for navigating the complexities of client-based learning.

The studio is a core strand of design education, and working with real clients is one of the most valuable ways for students to develop their professional design practice skills.

The book is a practical guide to working on client and community work in the design studio – how to collaborate with and connect to communities, find and retain clients, and manage real-world design problems.

The book is structured in four parts:

  1. Why: Establishes the pedagogical value of client projects, emphasizing their role in fostering industry connections, experiential learning, and student empowerment.
  2. What: Focuses on the practicalities of community engagement, client selection, and structuring studio experiences to achieve learning goals.
  3. Who: Examines the roles and responsibilities of students, faculty, and clients, highlighting the importance of effective communication, collaboration, and articulating value.
  4. How: Offers guidance on launching and managing a student-run design studio, including financial management, operational logistics, and planning for long-term sustainability.

This is the book Jessica and Meaghan wish existed when they were thinking about starting a design studio and took over a design studio (respectively). This book addresses a critical gap in design pedagogy literature by providing a comprehensive resource for educators seeking to bridge the gap between academia and professional practice.

Key contributions include:

  • Practical Guidance: Offers concrete advice and actionable strategies for implementing client-based projects, from finding clients to managing budgets to assessing student learning.
  • Diverse Perspectives: Incorporates insights from numerous interviews with design educators, students, and industry professionals, representing a range of institutional contexts and pedagogical approaches.
  • Emphasis on Ethics and Community Engagement: Provides a framework for ethical client interactions, emphasizing the importance of designing with communities rather than for them.
  • Focus on Student Empowerment: Highlights the role of client projects in fostering student agency, leadership, and professional development. (Chapter 3 of this book also features Najla Mouchrek’s Model for Empowerment in the Transition to Adulthood)
  • Support for Student-Run Studios: Offers dedicated chapters on launching, managing, and sustaining student-led design studios.

This book aims for design educators to:

  • Integrate client-based projects into their courses.
  • Develop effective strategies for finding and managing clients.
  • Create meaningful learning experiences that foster student growth and professional preparedness.
  • Build and sustain successful student-run design studios.
  • Promote ethical and socially responsible design practice.

The book also hopes to empower design students to:

  • Confidently work with “real world” clients and community partners.
  • Be more prepared to graduate and enter industry.
  • Understand dynamics of client interactions.

By providing students and educators with the necessary tools and knowledge, this book will contribute to a more engaged, impactful, and relevant design education that better prepares students for the challenges and opportunities of the professional world.

Methodology

The book used a mixed-methods approach, combining:

  • Literature Review: Synthesized existing research on design pedagogy and experiential learning.
  • Surveys: Gathered quantitative data on client-based practices in design programs across the country and around the world.
  • Interviews: Collected qualitative insights from design educators, students, and industry professionals.
  • Case Studies: Via interview, examined successful examples of client projects and student-run studios.
  • Authors’ Expertise: Leveraged the authors’ years of experience in design education and running a student-led studio.

Overall, this book represents a culmination of the authors’ passion for design education and their commitment to preparing students for successful and meaningful careers. It is a resource they wish they had when they first embarked on their journey. They hope it will serve as a valuable guide for fellow educators and their students and contribute to a more vibrant and impactful design education landscape.

Chapter 1Download

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner-up recipient in the category of Scholarship: Publication.

Biography

Meaghan A. Dee is an Associate Professor and Chair of Graphic Design at Virginia Tech, where she also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Creativity, Arts, and Technology. Her work centers on connecting communities through storytelling and immersive design experiences and by fostering collaboration between students, faculty, and industry professionals. Meaghan sees design as a tool for engagement, communication, and innovation.
In addition to her role at Virginia Tech, Meaghan is a docent emeritus for the Letterform Archive in San Francisco and served as co-chair for the AIGA Design Educators Community (AIGA DEC) Executive Board—a group dedicated to supporting and connecting design educators across the world. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Jessica Meharry is a designer, researcher, and educator who develops justice-oriented design methodologies for professional practice. She teaches courses in the politics of design, critical contexts of design, and the philosophical context of design research. Jessica received a PhD from the Institute of Design (ID), an MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design, and a bachelor of science from Northwestern University. Jessica’s cross-disciplinary research interests focused on designing for equitable economies, strategizing processes that frame equity as an innovation driver, and developing inclusive design management pedagogy. Jessica’s current research projects include the development and testing of an anti-oppressive design framework focused on information and communication technologies. She is also a collaborator on a research project led by Hillary Carey, PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, in which they’re using design methods to explore anti-racist futures in organizational contexts.

Gadzooks: An Embellished Connection Between Like-Minded Characters

The College for Creative Studies / BFA Communication Design department began a partnership with The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation’s Curators and Archivist

Susan LaPorte
Professor
College for Creative Studies

Communication Design and typography have been intertwined from the start, as the urge to express moved from the oral to the written, so has this partnership. Consider the enterprising graphic marks pressed into clay to communicate commerce by Sumerians, hieroglyphs documenting Egyptian rituals, the innovation of movable type first in the east, and then the west, to the typographic alphabet soup from the industry period, and ones/zeros that continue to document our thoughts through the words we write and the typographic expressions we employ to amplify their messages. The shape that typography has taken reflects the taste(s), technology(s), and need(s) of global citizens through time.

The College for Creative Studies / BFA Communication Design department began a partnership with The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation’s Curators and Archivists. The class was given their vast collections of objects and artifacts as a starting point for their type design inquiry. Each student documented typography/or graphic marks found or embedded within carriages, signage, broadside, machinery, games, as inspiration for a new typeface that expanded the sample and inspired new alphabet of their own vision. Additionally, the goal was for students to see the importance of research around a design can broaden their design practice; that design is not always about serving a client, but also expanding knowledge around our discipline.

A typographic history lecture was shared to broaden their understanding of type, written communication, and the technology that shaped information through the centuries. Students then focused their own critical research, to discover greater relevance of context and meaning to the design of their type specimens. The process of creating were iterative, critical, and resulted expanding the students understanding of design practice and original type designs inspired from the collection.

The results of this class and our partnership with the HFM, and with the financial support of the Ford Fund are a set of publications, entitled Gadzooks: An Embellished Connection Between Like-Minded Characters. It is a documentation of 13 new typefaces, designed by 13 new type designers, expanding our typographic legacy.

This design research was presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 9.1: Kent State University on Saturday, October 15, 2022.

Exploring Connections between Environment and Community Through Design

Students explore design methods and criteria through which the meaning of the typographic message and form may be altered.

Danilo Bojic
Assistant Professor
Winona State University

With global warming and climate changes, environmental topics—including awareness, conservation, and outreach—became relevant topics in several humanistic disciplines, including design. The collaborative effort, though interdisciplinary approach, needs to be made to provide students with solid educational opportunities during their design studies beyond the traditional curriculum.

As part of the Advanced Typography in Visual Communication course at Winona State University, students engage with community members around current environmental topics involving Lake Winona, Winona, MN. Through the project, students further develop compositional skills and methods of visual organization using abstraction. Students consider and develop an awareness of subtleties and detail of the letterforms and the effect of formal alteration on a neutral, without bias or obvious meaning, letterform. Through semantics and syntax, students explore design methods and criteria through which the meaning of the typographic message and form may be altered. At first, students raise questions regarding conservation and local/regional impact, followed by investigating a series of topics concentrating on types of pollution and visualizing them through experimental typographic methods. Finally, they develop creative responses raising awareness and informing the local community through project work. 

Findings presented give a better look at the overall health of Lake Winona, including water clarity; blue-green algae and toxin levels; nutrients, plants, and algae relationship levels. Visual responses range from experimental typographic, mark-making, and mix media representations of different types of pollution to infographics providing guidance for better daily practices in gardening and waste management. Students’ call to action could result in fertilizing reduction by the local community, fostering expansion of naturally occurring native plants to filter water nutrients and lowering yard waste entering and affecting the lake and the local ecosystem.

The documented experience provides fertile ground for future iterations of this class as a method of following positive/negative environmental development in this local community and creating a platform to raise awareness and call to action.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 7.1: Oakland University, MI on October 17, 2020.

Guided Experiential Learning for Design Innovators

C.J. Yeh
Professor, Assistant Chair
Graphic Design
Fashion Institute of Technology

FIT is one of the pioneers in creative technology and design education. For this presentation, the founder of the Creative Technology program at FIT, C.J. Yeh, will introduce the most innovative design projects from FIT’s creative technology courses.

FIT’s Creative Technology curriculum has strong focuses on augment and virtual reality, user experience design, design thinking, and digital thinking. Digital thinking is probably the primary difference between Creative Technology and the other programs at FIT. For Creative Technology program at FIT, technology is more than just a tool, it is an arena in which the students learn to explore new possibilities in digital media and conceptualize new experiences and digital product innovations that has never been done before.

One of the most unique pedagogy from FIT’s Creative Technology and Design Program is called “Guided Experiential Learning.” It is a unique merger between the traditional studio classes and internship. Through its Guided Experiential Learning initiatives, FIT faculty and students have worked with major brands and international research institutions like the National Football League (NFL), Infor, and Fabrica–a highly regarded research center in Italy. For each Guided Experiential Learning project, FIT’s faculty design customized workshops, lectures, and training to maximize the learning for students, and, at the same time, ensure the collaborating brands/organizations receive the highest quality design products at the end of the process.

This presentation will share case studies, best practices, and insights on how Guided Experiential Learning has been adopted in higher education. Relevant pedagogies and teaching methodologies will be introduced, and a discussion regarding the challenges and opportunities particularly in its application and relevance to college-level design education.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Conference Los Angeles on February 24, 2018.

Be Good to Me: How Advertising Students Made San Jose Think Twice About Illegal Dumping

John Delacruz
Professor of Advertising
School of Journalism and Mass Communications
San Jose State University

Creativity is a powerful driver for brand communications. Entertaining and engaging, we tell the world stories across media channels that encourage consumption and allow brands a central role in shaping identities, communities and history. The skills learnt by students on creative programs can be a force for good. As educators in the field of advertising and other creative industries we should be guiding our students to make ethically minded decisions, not just to continue the cycle of consumption of which we, as communicators, are integral spokes.

In this case study they learn the importance of empathy and how this becomes a strength in the communications process, they learn to respond to a real life client and a real life target group. They also learn about issues that impact the community, the environment, and become better informed citizens. Our students have grown up with social currency, they are a sharing generation, global citizens, media aware and ethically minded. They are already switched on to alternative futures and therefore open to guidance on how to use their creativity for good.

This case study will focus on one specific example of service learning from the advertising program at San Jose State University. Our client was the City of San Jose’s Environmental Services Division in collaboration with CommUniverCity. The brief was to inform citizens of San Jose about illegal dumping. Our students crafted a campaign that spoke of the relationships between our everyday stuff and ourselves, reminding us to treat our treasures with respect when the time comes to let them go. They worked in an agency team and learnt about issues affecting urban neighborhoods and the environment. The program offered them experience reflecting the world of work and the world around them, civic responsibility and storytelling. They have hopefully become informed, engaged and aware citizens as well as effective and creative communicators.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.1: San Jose State on Saturday, Sept 30, 2017.