VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY
Abstract
As generative AI accelerates creative production across design disciplines, foundational studios must now consider how to adequately prepare students for a rapidly shifting technological landscape. While many beginning design programs introduce digital software in the first year, our interdisciplinary curriculum has remained deliberately analog: students spend two semesters focused on refinement of manual craft, material exploration, and iterative physical testing before encountering any digital drawing or modeling tools. This structure creates a distinct opportunity to integrate generative AI not as a stand-in for digital modeling, but as a bridge between conceptual ideation and hands-on making. Our long-standing cardboard chair project becomes the central site for this integration. In this emerging model, AI functions as a provocateur: using an image-generating chatbot, students produce speculative imagery intended to broaden the range of ideas they consider before building. They then construct and test small-scale paper and full-scale cardboard prototypes, iterating until they arrive at a cardboard chair that is comfortable, attractive, and structurally sound. These analog trials reveal the value of AI and its ability to extend students’ conceptual repertoires and its limitations, assumptions, and occasional biases, fostering critical awareness rather than passive acceptance of AI tools. The framework emphasizes transparency and ethical practice through documentation, disclosure, and reflection on how AI informed decision-making is conducted. Class discussions focus on AI prompt construction, authorship, and the relationship between digital suggestion and material reality. By embedding AI within an analog-first curriculum, this work demonstrates how generative tools can strengthen rather than erode foundational learning, offering a model for design programs seeking to bridge traditional studio pedagogy with evolving technological landscapes.
Sarah Young, AIA is an Associate Professor and Design Foundations Coordinator at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette School of Architecture and Design. She teaches first-year design courses in which she emphasizes making entry into the design fields more accessible. Her scholarship has been presented at national and international conferences, including the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Sarah is an architect and partner at EmeryMcClure Architecture.
Lucy Satzewich is a designer and Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Foundations at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette School of Architecture and Design. Based between New Orleans and Toronto, her work investigates how architecture can respond to overlapping crises of climate, health, and social inequity through structures of care. She has held the AIA-AAHF FHER Griffin/McKahan/Zilm Graduate Fellowship in Health Facility Planning & Design for research on harm reduction and overdose prevention sites as a new typology in healthcare architecture, and a Public Interest Design Fellowship with the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, supporting research on water management infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. Her work has been presented at the Royal Geographical Society, AMPS, and the Healthcare Design Conference, and published in The Funambulist and NCBDS Proceedings. She holds a B.A. in Cultural Studies from McGill University, a Diploma in Cabinetmaking from Rosemont Technology Center, and a Master of Architecture from Tulane University, and has worked as a designer at the Office of Jonathan Tate (OJT) in New Orleans.
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Thursday 25th June, 2026