Graduate Studio: Technology B [Class Notebook]
(DES-720B-04)

Week 6

How do the values we hold as designers align with, or resist the values embedded in AI tools?

This week, guest designer and researcher Tuan Huang leads a lecture and workshop on identity, creative agency, and AI. Through collage, annotation, and discussion, we will map our design values against the systems we use.

Class Notebook

Andrea Cheng

I learned that categories can make patterns visible, but they also make me choose which part of an image matters most. A dog meme, for example, could be grouped with animals, collages, or text-based images. I’m wondering how I can show those overlapping relationships without making the map too difficult to read.

Binjia Li

I learned that changing how I group colors reveals different relationships between them. A color can suggest several feelings, so the categories are choices rather than fixed truths. How do personal memories and everyday situations change what a color means to us?

Jiayi Li

I don’t have any specific questions at the moment. Thank you!

Lulah Balde

I learned more about taxonomy, morphology, and also how mundane things we observe and are drawn to can turn into systems that we can further dissect.

Mingfu Yang

Why does everyone so consistently depict a star with one point facing upward and place two eyes beneath that point?

Rebecca Davidson

Is the data set fair if it is completely based around my perception?

Seulgi Choei

Through this process, I realized that the same archive can produce completely different categories depending on how it is sorted. Sorting by cause, by object, or by verb each made different relationships visible.

Wendy Wang

I learned that “not full” is more complex than simply being empty. By collecting everyday objects, I noticed that empty space can come from different situations, such as being used, consumed, unfinished, missing, or intentionally left empty. I also learned that the same object can fit into multiple categories depending on its context. This mapping helped me see patterns and relationships that I would not notice by looking at individual objects separately.

Zoe Liu

I learned that reaction images are not as easy to categorize as I originally thought. The same image can belong to different categories depending on the context, which made me wonder whether its meaning comes from the image itself or from the way we use it.

Week 6: Mapping Our Values in the Age of AI

Aby Warburg, [Panel B from _Bilderatlas Mnemosyne_](https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/panels/panel-b/), 1927–29. Photograph from the Warburg Institute Archive, presented by Cornell University Library in partnership with the Warburg Institute.
Aby Warburg, Panel B from Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 1927–29. Photograph from the Warburg Institute Archive, presented by Cornell University Library in partnership with the Warburg Institute.

Reading Discussions

Guest Lecture and Workshop

Tuan Huang is a PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research lies at the intersection of design, education, and AI, exploring the values that emerge between these fields. Using Research through Design (RtD) methods, she examines how design practice can shape AI and how AI is reshaping design practice.

Her recent work, “Workmanship of Learning: Embedding Craftsmanship Values in AI-Integrated Educational Tools,” presented at ACM CHI, explores how AI can support agency, creative struggle, and productive friction in design education.

The session has two parts. First, we will explore the alignments, misalignments, and tensions between our values as designers and those embedded in existing AI tools. Through collage and annotation, we will map our identities and practices onto the current technological landscape, using aesthetic expression as a form of critical inquiry. In the second half, Huang will share her work and discuss her broader research practice around design and AI values.

Readings

Assignment 6

This assignment is part 1 of the project Uncertain Archive.

Submit Assignment

Step 1: Collect

Begin with something you can recognize before you can fully explain it: a feeling, gesture, visual tendency, social behavior, kind of object, recurring situation, way of speaking, family habit, neighborhood detail, design language, or other phenomenon that keeps catching your attention.

Build an archive of at least 100 items around it. The archive can contain photographs, screenshots, text, drawings, sounds, objects, recordings, found material, fragments of conversations, your own work, or anything else that belongs to the world you are trying to understand. The archive should be a reflection of your own observations and experiences, not a replication of existing datasets.

Step 2: Map

Using this week’s reading on Morphology, Taxonomy, and Typology, organize the archive into a map. You do not need to follow only one method. Try different ways of making relationships visible and notice what each structure allows you to see.

You might organize through:

Your map does not need to resolve the archive into a perfect system. Look for places where the system becomes unstable: an item that belongs to several groups, a category that becomes too broad, an unexpected repetition, a missing type, or a relationship that you can sense but cannot yet name.

Bring Next Week