Gen AI can provide collective knowledge beyond individual knowledge to allow people to connect with content beyond personal creativity. The emergence of Gen AI is a good way to help students to think outside the box for creativity cultivation in design education. However, there is still a lack of teaching methods for creative training in Chinese design education with Gen AI integration. According to theory, in traditional creativity training, the association thinking, and critical thinking approach could facilitate creativity. However, the impact of these two methods on creativity training integrated with Gen AI is still unknown. Therefore, we proposed critical thinking and association thinking as pedagogy to apply in real design classes. The purpose of this research is to understand the student's experience and interpretations of Gen AI integrated creative training with pedagogies. Therefore, we employed qualitative-based methods like focus groups and interviews which includes around 60 student participants and 3 teacher participants. The teaching intervention lasted for two weeks. Our findings shows 1) teaching pedagogies has positive impacts for creative thinking because it can enable students better combine the content generated by Gen AI to do divergent thinking. 2) In terms of cognition, students believe that communication with Gen AI through pedagogies can stay focus and enter the mental flow. 3) Most importantly, without the assistance of teaching methods, students have low willingness to combine Gen AI to produce their own ideas but rely on Gen AI to provide content.

Authors:
Yaqi Zhang, The Hongkong Polytechnic University, China
Zaixing Liu, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, China
Yaoyao Huang, Michael Graves College, China
Xiaojing Huang, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, China
Yinxuan Zhou, Michael Graves College, China
Henry Ma, The Hongkong Polytechnic University, China

About the Presenter(s)
Yaqi Zhang is a PhD student at the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Yaqi's research at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University is focused on exploring the impacts of generative AI on design education and the creativity cultiviation.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule

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