Simon Willison’s Weblog

RISD BFA Industrial Design: AI Software Design Studio. Fascinating syllabus for a course on digital product design taught at the Rhode Island School of Design by Kelin Carolyn Zhang.

Designers must adapt and shape the frontier of AI-driven computing — while navigating the opportunities, risks, and ethical responsibilities of working with this new technology.

In this new world, creation is cheap, craft is automatable, and everyone is a beginner. The ultimate differentiator will be the creator’s perspective, taste, and judgment. The software design education for our current moment must prioritize this above all else.

By course's end, students will have hands-on experience with an end-to-end digital product design process, culminating in a physical or digital product that takes advantage of the unique properties of generative AI models. Prior coding experience is not required, but students will learn using AI coding assistants like ChatGPT and Claude.

From Kelin's Twitter thread about the course so far:

these are juniors in industrial design. about half of them don't have past experience even designing software or using figma [...]

to me, they're doing great because they're moving super quickly

what my 4th yr interaction design students in 2019 could make in half a semester, these 3rd year industrial design students are doing in a few days with no past experience [...]

they very quickly realized the limits of LLM code in week 1, especially in styling & creating unconventional behavior

AI can help them make a functional prototype with js in minutes, but it doesn't look good