The Curiosity Machine
The most interesting class on AI being taught today isn’t for engineers at Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, but for art students at RISD, the famed institution that produced both the Talking Heads and Airbnb.
Taught by Kelin Carolyn Zhang, best known for being one half of the design duo behind Poetry Camera — the camera that uses AI to print out poems of what it sees instead of photos — the course takes 3rd year Industrial Design students and challenges them to create real products and apps worthy of a professional designer or a VC-backed startup.
How are the students doing it?
The students are encouraged to make deliberate and abundant use of AI. Zhang has turned the traditional process upside down. The students protype, test, and iterate, using AI. And when they’ve got something they want to take further, they then just jump into coding the apps and solving problems — even if they have no idea how — by asking AI for help every step of the way.
She has publicly posted her syllabus. You can read it here
Notice it’s a Notion doc, not a PDF. That’s because she changes and rearranges as she goes — adding in new guest speakers and adjusting the course based on the accelerating progress of the students. For instance, the students quickly grew out of basic artifacts and wanted to code real projects using APIs, so she’s moving that up so the students can learn it sooner.
She is also tweeting about the experience as it goes. You can follow along the Tweet thread here
https://twitter.com/kelin_online/status/1843731509246865606
Zhang has also stacked the class with designers and engineers from her previous life in the tech world: MidJourney, Figma, Humane, OpenAI, Apple and more. This past week I was one of her guest lecturers. I spoke on the Architecture of Story and Agentic Design.
Lecturing in her class felt a little like a homecoming for me. I had studied painting at RISD in the 90s in a precursor to the dual degree program with Brown. I did it by getting into both schools and then petitioning both administrations to let me take more than the normal four crossover classes. I moved fluidly between both schools. It was wonderful. It also put me in a position to operate at the intersection of different disciplines.
(side note: have you seen 90s Art School? an instagram account of scanned photos from that era at RISD). (Read more bout it here)
Now back to the AI design class…
A few months ago, I hosted a workshop on “Agentic Design” called Augmented Imagination (after the article I wrote in 2023), where I posited that the future belonged to artists and designers.
The idea is that when AI can code anything instantly, then the only thing that will matter is what we design in the first place. And that artists and designers are best positioned to do this well. We then walked through the emerging practices that used AI to augment the imagination of the creators (and help them build it). Zhang presented her Poetry Camera at the event. It was a huge hit. She and her art partner Ryan Mather, were one of the best examples of people who were living up to the claims I had made that AI can help you build seemingly impossible projects.
Now she’s making this happen for a whole generation of students. Midterms are next week, I can’t wait to see what the students create. And by the time the students do their final projects, each will have transformed into an artist/designer who builds.
I’ve lectured at many schools, and the students in all of them are universally smart and engaged, but this class, in this moment, felt different. It felt like watching people discover the world could be recreated, shaped, formed, adjusted, improved — and that all we had to do was try.
But unlike other eras, where human effort, no matter how industriously applied, was never quite enough, this generation has AI on their side. AI holds within it the sum of all human knowledge. It contains all the ideas, research, thoughts and effort of everyone who came before, all bundled into a curiosity-machine that then waits for us to ask it what we need to know. Suddenly the idea that we might make the word we wish to inhabit didn’t seem so far-fetched. It seems possible. Or at the very least, it seems exciting to try.
