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Frederique has discovered that ‘prompt engineering’ is a key skill for her students using visual generative AI (vGenAI).
Academic in focus
Dr Frederique Sunstrum is a lecturer at the UTS School of Design and was asked to restructure the subject 84610 Inside Design for Autumn 2023. Inside Design is a first-year foundational subject for the Bachelor of Product Design. Students are introduced to the idea that products shape our identity, our possibilities, and our preferences.
Objective
The objective is for students to prompt generative AI tools to ideate illustrations set to a particular design philosophy.
Fourth-year design students already use a form of AI for their work; core digital applications in Product Design such as CAD have been developing machine learning components for years.
The task
The vGenAI tools Midjourney and Dall-E were introduced in Week 3 as AI concept generators for ideation.
- Students need to design illustrated concepts of either a garden, kitchen or craft hand tool from the perspective of a chosen design philosophy. Students are invited to create ideas for their illustrated concepts using vGenAI.
- Task background: students work in groups to research particular designers and their design philosophies. Then they pick one as the subject of a 3min video and present this to the class.
AI results
Around half of the students had not seen the tools before. Students without much experience of writing prompts for vGenAI were immediately discouraged. Some gave up on using AI completely. While those with some experience and practice could get useful results.
As with any product design assessment, students are required to acknowledge all the applications used to create their concept, including correct attribution from the ideation phase. As this school is very process oriented, the entire process needs to be presented for review.
What next?
Simplify
- Future introductions to vGenAI will be simplified even more, with much more scaffolding around the prompting process.
- Overall, there will be fewer assumptions about what prior knowledge students are bringing to class.
- It was surprising how little experience and awareness students had of AI tools.
Focus on prompts
- There will also be a stronger focus on how to write effective prompts for the vGenAI in order to produce a result that is meaningful and usable.
- Prompts need to be very specific, the more detail the better the output.
- The gap in the prompt writing skill was significant.
- This skill been termed ‘Prompt Engineering‘.
- Frederique did provide Midjourney Prompts from Simon Terry for pre-reading but found it might be better to spend more time on this during the tutorials.
Explore the vGenAI art tools Midjourney and Dall-E 2.