Proposal approved Week 10 · Studio Week 13 · Presented Week 14 · 25% of your grade

Develop a portfolio-quality design project that explores your own position on AI in creative practice. It should demonstrate technical skill, but more than that it should show what you have come to believe about authorship, collaboration, and creative responsibility.

You can embrace AI, challenge it, misuse it, or reject it entirely. Any of those makes a good project, as long as the choice is intentional and you can defend it.

Where the midterm asked whether you can use AI to solve a design problem, this one asks what you actually think about it.

Some positions worth arguing with: AI should disappear, so build something that makes it invisible. AI is ruining illustration, so make the project that proves it. AI makes designers more creative, so show it. AI is terrible at typography, so go find out exactly where it breaks. AI is becoming a new creative medium, so treat it like one.

Territories

• Design practice — brand system, campaign, editorial, packaging, interactive
• Storytelling — short film, illustrated book, animation, comic, installation
• Experimental — creative coding, tool building, generative systems, interactive installation, data visualization, speculative design
• Research — bias, accessibility, copyright, creative workflow, AI literacy, visual essay

What you turn in

1. The body of work. Not one polished artifact — enough work that someone can see the position you're taking.
2. Process book, organized into the four D's — Discover, Define, Design, Develop. Show me the research behind the position you're taking, the ideas you abandoned, your prompts, your iterations, your failures and revisions, and why you changed direction when you did.
3. Your finalized Personal AI-Use Policy.
4. Critical reflection, 500 words, on authorship, ethics, and the role of AI in this work. Where did your policy hold, and where did this project push against it?
5. Director's commentary, 3–5 minutes. No slides. Just you talking. Why did you make this? What surprised you? What failed? Where did AI help, and where did it get in your way? Which decisions were yours?

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Using no AI at all is a valid answer — if rigorously argued. You'd still have to show in the process book that you understood what the tools offered and why you declined. That's a harder process book to write, not an easier one.

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The same question as the midterm, and it matters more here: if someone else had your prompts, could they make your project? If the answer is yes, it probably isn't finished yet.

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