Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
Generative AI tools present critical challenges to navigating the future of design education and practice. While the tools enable the rapid generation of compelling content, they also call for new forms of digital agency grounded in criticality, situational awareness, experimentation, and resistance to platform dependency. These technologies, like other major disruptors before them such as the printing press and desktop computing, will have a profound effect on creative industries. Design educators and students must develop core literacy with these tools, and understand how to locate them professionally, or risk being left behind. As Design educators we argue the need to emphasise the critical and ethical implications of AI such as resource and data extraction, privacy, intellectual property, and the slow implementation of legislative guardrails. Design education both reflexive and highly adaptive in nature must respond to and critique the political, socio-cultural and technological forces creating this industry, and the tools becoming available for either professional or public use. This paper from Australian design academics presents 3 case studies where students have been taught AI tools and how they may apply them in projects. These practice-based examples of teaching and learning demonstrate how generative AI platforms can be woven critically into design education to support collaboration, ideation and design development. The case studies demonstrate how students can be guided to co-create with AI while interrogating its social and cultural impacts on the world we live in.
Dr Judith Glover is a Senior lecturer in the Industrial Design Program at RMIT, Melbourne Australia. She is currently a co-director of RMIT’s Wearable and Sensing Network (W+SN) which leverages over 100 researchers from across the University in Creative Practice, Stem and Health to facilitate multi-disciplinary research or T+L projects. An important theme of her research and teaching focuses on the intersection of new technologies into Industrial Design syllabus and practice.
Dr Emma Luke is a designer and academic working at the intersection of wearables, embodied AI, and post-digital design. Her research explores data, materiality, and aesthetics to create holistic artefacts that foreground human and ecological wellbeing. A director of the RMIT Wearables & Sensing Network, she co-leads transdisciplinary projects in MedTech, design innovation, and GenAI in design pedagogy; Kate Geck is an artist and academic in the Interior Design program at RMIT. Working across textiles, technology, and generative AI. Her practice explores interactive, textile-informed approaches to human–machine creativity and network culture, producing installations, surfaces, and pedagogical research. She has exhibited internationally and co-authored studies on generative AI in design education.
Dr. Stéphanie Camaréna is a globally recognised AI futures design expert. Her work applies human-centered AI to sustainability transitions, with a focus on food systems, design innovation, and ethics. She advises international organisations including the UN and teaches ethical AI at RMIT. Her work bridges research, regulation, and real-world transformation.
Bria Versace is an industrial designer (RMIT) specialising in Product Service System Design (Politecnico di Milano). She is currently based at RMIT University, where her research and teaching focuses on systemic and social approaches to service design. Her work explores the intersections of design, social innovation, and the common good, with applications across healthcare, commercial practice, and community transformation.
Kate Thaus is a cross-disciplinary industrial designer and PhD candidate in Digital Health at RMIT. Her research intersects speculative design, AgeTech, and ethical AI. Kate’s practice is centred on products found in the home, designing authentic “objects that speak” through their form, narrative driven design, critical approaches and social impact.
9:30 pm - 11:00 pm
Thursday 20th November, 2025