Re-imagining design with AI: How Tec professor challenges his students

By combining creativity and technology, Édgar Ludert has discovered how to teach art and design in partnership with artificial intelligence (AI).

Not only do his classes teach students how to create, but also how to imagine their creations: from sculptures that respond to laughter to food-inspired furniture visualized with AI.

Ludert sees AI as a tool that sparks the imagination and incorporates it in his lessons as an essential part of the creative process, thereby challenging his students to extend themselves beyond the traditional boundaries of design.

“My instinct as a teacher was ‘Let’s do something with this’ (with AI).” He doesn’t regard this technology as an end in itself, but as a starting point for personal and artistic exploration.

The Tec de Monterrey professor’s projects include Joy Oracle, an interactive sculpture that responds to the sound of human laughter, and foodniture, which challenges students to turn food into furniture specifically designed for human use.
 

An algorithm that interprets the “code” of laughter as art

In response to the challenge of creating a project combining art, technology, and science for the 2024 Creative Fund contest, the Hermosillo campus professor and regional director of the School of Architecture, Art, and Design (EAAD) recruited students with a common goal.

“The idea was to design a hybrid, organic, artificial creature capable of reacting to human laughter: a piece you could interact with that would react and move using AI with a custom-made algorithm.

“I wanted to use a non-linguistic, universal, symbolic code such as laughter (...) Everyone in the world laughs. The idea revolved around using this code of joy, happiness, even nervousness, as a catalyst.”

Over the course of eight months, Ludert’s team conceptualized, built the components, assembled, and programmed a “living” wooden sculpture, whose panels or petals had the ability to change position in response to the sound of laughter.

In addition to being a piece of art exhibited at the Monterrey campus Exhibition Pavilion and in the EXPEDITION FEMSA building at the end of 2024, Joy Oracle allows us to take a time-out.

“Joy Oracle was conceived as space to take some time out in cities where frenetic lifestyles are the order of the day. It was very important for us to encourage people to take some time for themselves in a public space.

“While technology in cities is in constant progress and evolution, this project invites you to reflect, play, disconnect a little from the absurdity of the world, and simply laugh, let go, and find catharsis.”
 

AI-rendered “food” furniture

At this intersection of artificial intelligence and design, Ludert challenges his undergraduate and graduate students to create foodniture by inviting them to transform food items into one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture.

In this project, students should choose a dish or an ingredient and use it as an input to create an item of furniture: from Japanese nigiri chairs and Alfredo pasta dining sets to stained glass made of candy.

Students make a preliminary sketch and then use Vizcom, a free AI program, to render and produce 3D models, thereby taking their designs from drawings to models that can be visualized in augmented reality.

Rendering is the process of generating an image or video from digital data or models.

“It’s a straightforward activity that requires simple but emotional input; this really does it for me because, as I’ve told my students, if something is not emotional, if it’s cold and they don’t have a connection, they’re never going to come up with something meaningful or memorable.”

“As I’ve told my students, if something is not emotional, if it’s cold and they don’t have a connection, they’re never going to develop something meaningful or memorable.”

The professor affirms that this practice has been highly effective since, in addition to triggering the imagination and playfulness, it enables them to experiment and learn to use this technological tool to create relevant competencies in their discipline.

“It’s all about inviting them to learn new things and to understand that there will always be challenges and new technologies, so if they stagnate or keep on using the same tools, the market and their competitors will devour them.

“It is also important to understand that the potential for creating something unique depends on students’ initiative and curiosity, not on AI (...) if you aren’t driven to take the world by storm, these platforms are not going to do you any good.”

Teaching how to use AI responsibly and ethically

While Ludert has found various ways of incorporating generative AI tools and custom algorithms into his teaching and discipline, he also stresses the importance of being aware how this is done.

Although he considers the increasing availability of free and accessible platforms to be something positive for the democratization of learning, he considers it imperative to contemplate the downsides.

“The accessibility of these new platforms brings many advantages because students capable of creative critical thinking can use them and push them to the limit, which is super cool, but there’s also the other side.”

Some of the risks that Ludert identifies include the creation of deep-fakes capable of spreading false information or misleading people, as well as a high number of prompts that bring about environmental deterioration.

“Democratization also involves certain risks if ethical considerations are not addressed (...) Students also need to be taught that it is not just about ‘clicking’ and playing with AI.

“This is something I remind them of a lot: that everything they do will become part of culture, so we have to take responsibility for its existence, recognize the consequences, and be attentive to how they use the technologies.”

A prompt is an instruction or message that guides an artificial intelligence application to generate a specific response.

The potential of AI and its limitations in the creative world

Finally, the professor remarked that while he finds the potential of increasingly using critical thinking to include AI ethically, consciously, and sensitively in creative settings remarkable, he also recognizes its limitations.

One of the biggest, on which the professor places most emphasis, is that generative AI has not yet reached an ‘advanced’ stage capable of self-management and, more significantly, capable of replacing human creativity.

“We have to be very clear that, at least at this point in time, AI does not possess the ability humans have to create something new. It doesn’t have that capability: what it does is a kind of remix or mixture using whatever information it has.

“So, the way I see it, AI is still a long way from the true essence of creation or creativity. They are very interesting, powerful tools, but they are still not up to the task of creating something that didn’t exist before or coming up with innovative ideas.”

This being the case, Ludert stresses the importance of not being afraid that these types of tools may displace professionals in creative fields and points out how it is imperative to learn how to use and ‘collaborate’ with them.

The professor concludes his remarks by expressing his optimism about the future of this technology, and explains how he believes it to be a perfect opportunity to foment creative, interdisciplinary projects and collaborations with other artists, as he has done with Nahum Romero.

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