The various AIs are changing the panorama of applications, particularly those aimed at design disciplines.
The ease with which results are obtained from an image and/or chained words, the prompts, quickly captivate new students.
Moving to interact with AIs with natural language has simplified them and put them in a place of quasi-humanity.
All these innovative tools are part of the paradigm with which students go through the learning process. The idea that the new surpasses the old is almost permanent. The media, through which design issues are fed, propose the panacea of new technologies that are also more persuasive on screens.
From this framework, we question the usefulness of AIs for learning design in the first years of the degree.
What do we intend as a learning process? Is reflection on the disciplinary field a pregnant experience for learners? We do not know for sure, perhaps because we do not have a record of the most critical formative moments for those who are or have been studying for the degree.
Design is a field that articulates multiple disciplines such as morphology, technology, history, ergonomics, anthropology, marketing, culture, etc. All of them revolve around the product.
We can establish that two skills are required to approach a design process in the professional field. The first is to determine the totality and hierarchy of the elements or factors that come together in the project, the data. The second is given by operating with that data to generate a new alternative and take a step forward. Therefore, it is essential to approach an abductive process to propose possible solution hypotheses that must be studied to determine the most favorable for the project.
Both skills result in what E. Morin calls "complex thinking" which also implies the capacity for synthesis and the aforementioned abductive logic.
These are the elements that we should value in order to judge AI about learning Design, particularly Industrial Design.
Like any tool, AI is not neutral. In a formal disciplinary field such as Design, that is, with form and content, proposing an immediate result can improve the form of the response but not necessarily its content. This comfort results in a shift towards the result and not the process, which is what is taught in the degree. We should review to what extent AI can give a person more capabilities and not less. Let us remember that Design is an eminently intellectual activity.