Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Design students’ use of AI in projects teaches career skills

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graphic design professors incorporated the use of artificial intelligence tools into classes this fall, allowing art and design students to use the tools to design sustainable communities and create retro cookbooks.

Students will be using AI in the workplace after they graduate, and the professors said it is important for them to be familiar with it.

“I’m very interested in AI and how designers can use it as a tool in their toolkit, not only in the classroom but in their professional careers,” said graphic design professor Jena Marble.

Headshot of Jena Marble

Graphic design professor Jena Marble

Marble’s students created recipe books that looked vintage but were made with generative AI tools – Adobe Firefly for images and ChatGPT for text.

Eric Benson, the chair of the graphic design program, gave students in his senior-level sustainable design class an assignment to use AI to imagine how a community could become more environmentally friendly. The students used Adobe Firefly or Midjourney to generate images before creating master plans for the community.

Both professors said their students initially were reluctant to use AI for several reasons – fear, because some courses forbid its use; the loss of the satisfaction of creating images themselves; ethical concerns about using the intellectual property of creators without permission or acknowledgement; and frustration that AI-generated images don’t look like what they’ve imagined.

“I continually have to stress to them, ‘You can use AI on this,’” Benson said. “They are finding there are limitations but also recognizing that the act of designing is more powerful than the AI. It’s helping generate ideas and then they have to be very specific and intentional with what happens next.”

Malynnda Johnson, a senior in sustainable design and a student in Benson’s class, created a green space to replace a parking lot outside of Urbana’s Common Ground Food Co-op and help with storm water drainage. She said AI helped her come up with ideas and narrow them down. Her final plan included a detention basin, rain garden and food garden.

“I was hesitant to use it at first because I wasn’t sure how it would impact creativity and the design process,” Johnson said. “The project turned out better for using AI.”

Sylvia Coogan, also a senior in sustainable design, photographed downtown Urbana and used Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature – which uses Firefly to add or remove content in images – to replace concrete streets with cobblestones or permeable pavers. She estimated she used AI for about 20% of the project and her own images for the rest.

“It was useful as an assistive tool,” Coogan said. “I still wouldn’t do all my work with it. It has the potential to remove the human element and maybe limit you in your creativity.”

Headshot of Juan Salamanca

Graphic design professor Juan Salamanca

In contrast, graphic design professor Juan Salamanca’s students initiated the use of AI to write code in his creative coding class. Salamanca said programmers are comfortable using AI assistants such as Microsoft Copilot for help in writing code, and GitHub, the online code repository where they share code and collaborate. Once their code works, they must use their own creativity to make a project visually appealing, he said.

Marble and Benson described AI’s role as one of a brainstorming partner or a storyboard used for inspiration, rather than a replacement for a designer’s creative and critical thinking skills. Marble said ChatGPT can be a creative collaborator that provides suggestions for fonts or color palettes or helps with writing contracts. She has used it in her work for copywriting, establishing project timelines, drafting a tactful email to address situations such as an overdue bill and researching cultural and historical information relevant to a project.

Image of a vintage-looking dessert cookbook created by graphic design student Abby Zimmerman.

Abby Zimmerman, a junior in graphic design, created a vintage dessert cookbook using AI tools.

“It’s a helpful tool to streamline creative processes,” she said. “As a designer, you should know how to use it, especially if you’re going to a smaller creative team or freelancing.”

Part of knowing how to use it is knowing how to write a prompt to get the desired results. Marble said her students learned to use specific wording to prompt AI to produce images with the retro look they wanted for illustrations and to get a cohesive look for multiple images.

Salamanca said that writing prompts to generate particular results will become a crucial job skill.

“Many AI images have the same visual style. When you look at an image, you can identify that it came from an AI system. If you’re not really good at prompting AI, you’re going to get standard images,” he said.

Image of a black-and-white poster with graphics of eyes and numbers created by Charlotte Watson, with an essay on bias in AI.

Charlotte Watson, a senior in advertising and graphic design, used images generated by Adobe Firefly as inspiration for her graphics for a poster on bias in AI.

Along with helping students use AI tools, the professors talked about the ethical issues that arise with AI use, including bias, data security, privacy, misinformation, copyright, sustainability and the need for transparency regarding the tools’ impact on work included in a portfolio.

Benson said the graphic design faculty members met recently to consider adopting a policy for the use of AI in assignments. They are looking at the policies of the U. of I.’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and those of other universities, he said.

Once students are in the workplace, they’ll be using tools that don’t even exist now, Salamanca said.

“The technology is going to evolve into something that may deviate into new forms of expression, and that’s an opportunity for designers and artists to explore how to create with these tools. I see this as an opportunity for inventing new languages, new ways of expression and new forms of narratives, like photography and cinema in the 20th century,” he said.

While AI might take over some tasks, the professors aren’t worried that it will eliminate most design jobs.

“I’m very optimistic about the future,” Marble said. “I think we should be using AI as a resource. I think it’s going to streamline our processes and make us more efficient and agile and successful.”

Editor’s notes: To contact Jena Marble, email jmarble@illinois.edu. To contact Eric Benson, email ebenson@illinois.edu. To contact Juan Salamanca, email jsal@illinois.edu.

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