From Ai-Aided Design To Physical Prototyping: Pedagogical Experiments For Fostering Critical Ai Literacy

Integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into design curricula offers both opportunities and challenges, and pedagogical experiments are needed to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Design educators must cultivate critical AI literacy, equipping students with competencies to engage with AI technologies creatively and thoughtfully. This paper presents multimodal pedagogical experiments incorporating generative AI into two design courses, “AI & Digital Fabrication” and “AI Creative Prototyping”, where 25 university-level students explored physical and digital prototyping, leveraging text, image, and 3D AI models. The courses were built on constructionist learning theory, and computational and AI design pedagogical literature. The resulting work demonstrated AI's potential to broaden students’ conception of design possibilities, accelerate technical learning processes, and foster proactive learning habits, but challenges also arose in each of these areas. These findings highlight the importance of constructionist learning environments where AI is used to supplement rather than supplant designer agency.