IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B

Abstract

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, design education must move beyond technical fluency toward cultivating ethically grounded and reflective judgment. This paper presents Safe/Unsafe, a speculative UX project in which students begin from personal emotional tension as a way to critically engage with AI—developing speculative models that explore the experiential and ethical complexity of human–machine interaction. Students design a UX/UI prototype that responds to a personally “unsafe” experience—such as an internal conflict, emotional vulnerability, or behavioral pattern—by integrating a personally meaningful anchor that evokes a sense of safety. This may take the form of a memory, image, ritual, relationship, or internal voice. The constraint functions as a site of creative exploration, critical interpretation, and ethical reflection. As students interact with AI tools throughout the design process, they are trained to question its outputs: Is this helpful or intrusive? Does it understand or misread me? Rather than treating AI as a source of solutions, students engage it as a generative tool—one that surfaces tensions, expands interpretive possibilities, and provokes reflection. They engage ethically by staying with personal and interpretive complexity, holding tensions between autonomy and dependence, care and control, intervention and trust. The resulting speculative constructs model potential relationships between human fragility and machine intelligence. This pedagogical method reframes UX as a medium for ethical self-inquiry and value-driven creativity—cultivating not just more thoughtful designers, but ethically grounded individuals capable of discerning what it means to use AI well.