At the symposium “KI in der Gestaltung. Insights and Prospects” at the Institute for Design Research at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Lasse Scherffig will be giving a lecture on “Un-Learning the Hype”.
The lecture presents efforts to anchor so-called artificial intelligence in design education in the BMBF project KITeGG. It shows how technologies and teaching-learning settings are being developed in the project, which at first glance must always lag behind the rapid developments in this field. At the same time, it demonstrates that these developments are perhaps slower than they seem and that ‘old’ technologies (such as GANs) and less noticed developments (such as edge computing) also open up important fields of action for designers. Finally, drawing on the joint work in KITeGG and his own artistic work, Scherffig argues that we are perhaps currently experiencing not a sudden automation of creativity but that we are rather part of a history of standardization (in design and beyond) that precedes current ‘artificial intelligence’ and makes it possible in the first place.