A designer explains how he teaches his Harvard students to be creative with AI: Interrogate it, iterate on it, stay with it longer than feels efficient, treat its output as something to work on rather than accept, misuse the technology, and show your prompts. (Eric Rodenbeck, Harvard Design Magazine)
- Eric Rodenbeck, GSD lecturer and Stamen Design founder, argues AI is a design medium like ink, not a productivity tool, and that treating it as one changes what designers can make and know.
- His students at Harvard use repetition, misuse, and semantic atomization to expose how AI systems drift, standardize, and invent, turning prompts into sketches and outputs into starting points.
- The practical takeaway: require prompt transparency as part of the work, not a footnote, so the chain of decisions behind an AI-assisted artifact stays visible and open to critique.
