Teaching AI: Art and Design Education Under Automation
Online Symposium. April 15th and 16th 2026
9 am - 12.30 pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) | 3 pm - 6.30 pm Central European Time (CET)
Participants from across disciplines are invited to join an international online research symposium hosted by the Department of Design and co-organized with the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at The Ohio State University. The symposium brings together artists, designers, educators, and researchers to examine how AI is reshaping the teaching of art and design and to discuss emerging pedagogical approaches in response to these developments.
Please confirm your attendance via the RSVP form. The participation link will be sent to registered participants one week before the event.
Over the past few years, generative AI has acquired an increasingly pervasive presence in digital media, producing a growing number of synthetic images, texts, and sounds. This new medium is often described as contributing to an “AI slop” in which human production appears degraded. At the same time, it is giving rise to new creative practices that are already shaping how art and design outcomes are made and taught. As AI tools enter educational contexts, students and teachers are navigating shifting workflows, displaced forms of expertise, and new forms of agency.
This raises a series of critical questions: What does it mean to teach art and design courses in a world where automation is increasingly available? How can artists, designers, and educators work with AI while questioning its limits, biases, and default standards? What kinds of teaching approaches are emerging in response? This symposium project aims to better identify and critically examine pedagogical, ethical, and technical issues within a community of art and design practitioners, educators, and researchers. It does so through the presentation of classroom case studies or teaching experiments conducted in educational contexts. Presentations will address the following two sub-themes: AI as an Environment (cognitive, semantic, technical, …), and AI as an Experiment (pedagogical, artistic, conceptual, …).
The symposium will consist of four 90‑minute online synchronous panel sessions held on April 15th and 16th, each featuring 2–3 speakers and including a moderated discussion and Q&A.
Full program: forthcoming
Steering committee: Gaëtan Robillard, Yvette Shen, Chris Coleman, Matt Lewis. Co-Sponsors: The Global Arts + Humanities | Cross-Disciplinary Research Exchange. Front image: Calvin Than, MFA student, Department of Design, The Ohio State University.
More information: https://tinyurl.com/teaching-AI-event