Career Readiness
An Attempt to Integrate a Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tool into a Design Semiotics Course View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Selin Gulden
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a current phenomenon that influences every aspect of life. Particularly in the realms of society and design, AI's capacity to generate images from text prompts is increasingly prevalent. Recent studies expand the integration of AI and machine learning (ML) principles into design education. This study highlights an experiment involving AI integration within the Design Semiotics for Interior Architecture and Environmental Design (IAED), a second-year major undergraduate course aimed at imparting essential skills for comprehending design's embedded meanings and decoding cultural and social messages. The study's motive is to foster creative exploration in design education by encouraging interactions among students, design semiotics, and AI using Midjourney, a generative AI tool that generates images from text prompts. Conducted over five weeks and structured into four stages, the experiment fosters iterative analysis and synthesis among student pairs. These stages involve (1) responding to randomly generated question models (i.e. How ‘abstract concept’ can be defined in the context of ‘spatial keyword’ based on the / through / as ‘semiotics terminology’?), designing prompts for Midjourney, and generating images, (2) providing feedback on peers' images, (3) refining prompts based on feedback, and (4) creating new images through blending previous iterations. The finale of this experiment involves presenting the entire process and reflecting on the experience of utilizing generative AI. The study's findings define both the advantages and challenges associated with employing generative AI programs and their associated ML technologies in design education.
Featured Unboxing the Pizza Effect: Cultural Appropriation in Package Design - a Case Study View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Neela Imani
Western brands are extremely adept at appropriating the Other. Whereas most consumer packaged goods appropriating minority cultures target non-minorities, occasionally they target the very culture being appropriated. While the former glorifies colonial imaginaries, reconstructing ethnocentric tourism via domestic regime, the latter brings these hegemonic ambitions to fruition, subjecting the racialized consumer to the racist simulacrum. Inspired by the culinary evolution of Italian gastronomy amidst globalization, this process of re-enculturation informed by Western, imperialist values is understood as the pizza effect. And although this theory was originally meant to describe the cultural appropriation and re-exportation of performative mechanisms, in graphic design, the pizza effect is applied quite literally. Package designers routinely appropriate the visual material of Othered cultures to facilitate the monopolization of the multicultural market. Generally, these colonial versionings are met with positive reception, with the cultural form garnering a heightened sense of social significance due to its popularity with the appropriating culture — a coolnessification, if you will. However, racialized and ethnicized consumers who are familiarized with the implications of their racialization and ethnicization — particularly diasporic enclaves within the Western context — historically object to the superficial commercialization of their cultural identities, therefore problematizing the pizza effect. A visual analysis of Golden Temple® Atta helps to further deconstruct this lens.
