Key details
Time
- 4pm – 5pm
Location
- Online
Price
- Free
Who can attend
- Everyone
Type
- Webinar
AI is changing both how we design and what we design. It lets anyone build small, specific, disposable tools in minutes, much as a craftsperson builds a jig in the shop for a single task. When students can build their own tools, teaching shifts toward intention, iteration, critique and towards rethinking what we train creative people to do.
In this conversation, Professor Clement Valla, Department Head of Computation, Technology and Culture at Rhode Island School of Design, and Tey Bannerman, Independent AI Advisor and former Head of McKinsey Design Europe, will explore how AI is reshaping the design landscape and education.
Clement will discuss “jig thinking”, a way of making and using your own tools with their assumptions in plain view and what it means for education. Tey will draw on his work with large organisations and design teams across industries to share practical tools and frameworks for bringing AI into the design process, in addition to looking at the intelligent, adaptive products and services it makes possible.
Speakers
Valla is the founding department head of Computation, Technology & Culture at RISD, home to the Art & Computation BFA and the Sound BFA, and previously served as dean of Experimental and Foundation Studies. His teaching treats technology as something to be understood, built, and worked through rather than simply used. He is represented by bitforms gallery, New York. He works with the logic of image-making systems. He is best known for Postcards from Google Earth, which collects the melting bridges, draping highways, and folded terrain produced by Google’s automated 3D maps. pointcloud.garden and Google Trees take a similar approach, using the scans and models these systems build to reconstruct the world. In each case, the apparatus producing the picture is the subject.
Engineer turned designer turned strategist. Former McKinsey Partner. Focused on closing the gap between AI's promise and what organisations can actually deliver. Today, he works independently - advising, building, teaching, and writing about the practical realities of making AI work within human systems. He advises companies and leaders on AI strategy and human-centred AI implementation. He’s lead lecturer and course creator for iF Academy’s AI strategy programme for design leaders, a lecturer on D&AD’s AI course, and faculty at the Marketing Academy. He co-authored The AI Revolution, a book that reached #1 on Amazon’s global AI charts. He’s developed practical tools - like the Four Modes and the practical Human in the Loop framework - now used by thousands of practitioners worldwide.
About Design for Good
The RCA x Design for Good Academy explores a life-centred design focused curriculum with a particular focus on SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being and SDG 13: Climate Action will focus on life-centred design, research, design innovation, and creative skills development. The content for the Academy draws upon the RCA’s postgraduate design programmes and best practice from the world’s leading practitioners of mission-led, interdisciplinary innovation.
Design for Good builds, trains and fosters a passionate global creative community to design direct and lasting impact for the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. On a breadth and scale only possible through cross-company collaboration.
In the series
The Royal College of Art, in collaboration with Design for Good, is launching a free, public Masterclass talk series as part of an exciting new initiative: the RCA x Design for Good Academy.
