Creative
Futures
Council

An AIGA New York program bringing educators together to identify the challenges design education is facing, and build the materials to meet them.

Sign up for early access to our first item: AI Literacy for Creative Classrooms, a live, work-in-progress set of nine modules across two tracks. Use it in your own higher ed classroom, and help us shape what to build next.

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A Quick Primer for Design Faculty

The design profession and the way faculty prepare future design professionals in the higher ed classroom are at a pivotal moment. Generative AI can now produce polished images, layouts, video, text, and visual variations before students have fully researched an audience, developed a concept, tested ideas, participated in critique, or worked through an iterative design process.

This raises questions specific to the design classroom: How do we preserve process when outputs appear finished too early? How do we evaluate work that may be visually convincing but conceptually weak? How do we continue to teach authorship, judgment, craft, and responsibility when parts of creative production are increasingly shared with automated tools?

Why These Modules Exist

Design faculty are being asked to respond to generative AI while the tools, institutional policies, professional expectations, and student attitudes surrounding them are still changing. Students may enter the classroom expecting to use AI, feeling pressured to avoid it, or unsure when and how to disclose its use. Faculty are also reconsidering how to teach and assess process when a student can generate a polished-looking result before demonstrating research, iteration, or intentional design decisions.

AI Literacy for Creative Classrooms

This is the first set of materials from Creative Futures Council, built from real questions design and film educators are already raising about AI in the classroom. This document contains nine modules, two tracks, and an arc from the basics to professional judgment.

Track 1 — Technical Foundations and Skills

  • Foundations: What generative AI is and how it works
  • Skill: Prompting as a design skill
  • Process: Maintaining the creative process with assistive AI
  • Critique: Evaluating and editing AI output

Track 2 — Professional Practice and Ethics

  • Ethics: AI ethics and model differences
  • Collaboration: Human-AI workflows Communication: Presenting AI-assisted work
  • Integrity: Content credentials and provenance
  • Anthropology: Investigating questionable assets

What each module contains

  • Topic intro: faculty-facing framing, no AI expertise required
  • In-class activity: 75–90 min structured exercise
  • Facilitation notes: how to introduce it, what to watch for
  • Discussion questions: five per module, for critique or LMS boards

Designed to evolve

These modules are also intended to remain fluid. Generative AI models, creative platforms, institutional policies, professional expectations, and public attitudes will continue to change. As technology advances, AI literacy must advance alongside it. Faculty may need to update examples, replace tools, revise terminology, reconsider ethical questions, or adapt activities to reflect new classroom and industry realities.