Queens College
DESN 370: Special Topics in Design

Fall 2026
Mondays, 1:40 PM – 5:30 PM
IB 203 and Zoom
Slack Channel
Notion Class Journal

Professors Contact Info

Name: Danne Woo
Email: [email protected]
URL: dannewoo.com
Office Hours: calendly.com/dannewoo/office-hours

Course Description

AI x Design is a studio course that prepares visual communication students to work critically and creatively alongside artificial intelligence. The field has changed dramatically: text-to-image tools that once felt experimental are now standard in professional workflows, video generation has become accessible to individual creators, and multimodal AI can move fluidly between text, image, motion, audio, and code.

This course is organized around two parallel tracks that run simultaneously throughout the semester:

Creative Practice — hands-on work with today’s best generative AI tools across image, branding, motion, audio, interactive design, and AI-assisted code for building custom design tools.
Critical Literacy — ethics approached as an intentional design decision: four focused deep-dive weeks on bias, labor, authorship, and power, with recurring threads when ethical questions are inseparable from the work being made.

The semester unfolds in four units: Foundations (Weeks 1-3), Discipline Deep-Dives in graphic design, illustration, animation, interaction design, and code (Weeks 4-10), Critical Practice (Weeks 11-12), and Synthesis (Weeks 13-14). Whatever your BFA concentration — Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Animation, or Illustration — the deep-dive unit gives your discipline focused studio time.

Because the tool landscape changes faster than any syllabus, each class opens with a “current events” slot covering new tools, lawsuits, and model launches. And because this course teaches judgment rather than output, process documentation is graded as heavily as finished products.

Students will build fluency in prompting and directing AI tools, understand how these models work at a conceptual level, and develop a personal framework for using AI with intention, transparency, and craft. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a portfolio-ready body of work and a critical voice in one of the most important conversations in contemporary design and creativity today.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

Apply generative AI tools across graphic design, illustration, animation, and interaction design with technical fluency.
Craft effective prompts — treating the prompt as a design brief — and direct AI outputs toward specific creative and aesthetic goals.
Use language models for creative ideation and project planning — diverging past first ideas, stress-testing concepts, interrogating a written brief, and scoping a project into phases and deadlines — while knowing which parts of the work must not be delegated.
Understand the conceptual mechanics of diffusion models, large language models, and multimodal systems.
Conduct structured bias audits of model outputs, comparing how different models answer the same prompt.
Use AI-assisted coding to build, test, and debug custom design tools and plugins.
Evaluate AI tools for commercial use, copyright risk, disclosure obligations, and ethical implications.
Articulate an informed position on authorship, attribution, bias, and labor in AI-assisted creative work.
Document, disclose, and defend every point where AI enters a professional design workflow.
Complete a substantial final project in which AI use is deliberate, defensible, and disclosed — including, if rigorously argued, the choice to use none.

Learning Outcomes

Mastery of a range of generative AI tools — image, video, audio, and code — and their application in design.
Understanding of the ethical, social, and cultural implications of AI in the creative industry.
Development of critical thinking skills about the future of design in the AI era.
Ability to integrate AI with traditional design practices for innovative solutions.

Tools & Platforms

Most course tools have free tiers or student access. Specific platforms will be introduced as needed.

Recommended but not required purchase: one paid multimodal LLM account — Claude or ChatGPT — currently about $20/month. Choose one platform to learn well; free accounts on the others are enough for comparison work in Weeks 2 and 3.

Image Generation

Adobe Firefly — commercial-safe, integrated with Creative Cloud
Midjourney — leading tool for artistic quality and aesthetics
ChatGPT / GPT-Image (OpenAI) — strong prompt fidelity and text-in-image
FLUX (Black Forest Labs) — photorealism and reference-based workflows

Video Generation

Runway Gen-4 — industry standard for creative video production
Google Veo 3 / Flow — cinematic multi-shot storytelling
Kling — cost-effective for iteration and longer clips

Audio & Music

Suno — AI music generation from text prompts
ElevenLabs — voice synthesis and audio narration
Google MusicFX — experimental sound and music

Design & Prototyping

Figma (with AI features) — UI design, prototyping, and collaboration
Adobe Express — template-based design with AI generation
Claude / ChatGPT — concept development, brief interrogation, project planning, research, writing, and code generation

Code & Tool-Building

Claude / ChatGPT / GitHub Copilot — AI-assisted coding: reading, testing, and debugging generated code
p5.js — creative-coding utilities and sketches
Figma Plugin API & Adobe scripting (UXP / ExtendScript) — building custom design-tool extensions
After Effects expressions — AI-assisted motion scripting

Communication & Documentation

Slack — class communication and resource sharing
Notion — process journal, weekly assignment submissions, and project process books (free Education plan with your CUNY email)
Class website: aixdesign.danne.design

Assignments & Projects

Tool Journal (10%) — All Semester

A weekly entry in your Notion process journal: the tool you tried, what you expected, what actually happened, the prompts you ran verbatim, what failed, and one judgment call you made. Graded on consistency and honesty, not polish — an entry that documents a dead end is worth more than one that shows only the output that worked. Entries are due Sunday night. The semester closes with a one-page synthesis of what your journal taught you about your own practice.

You will set up your journal in Week 1 from a template provided in class, and share it with me once. It stays yours after the course ends.

Ethics Position Paper (10%)

Assigned Week 3 | Due Week 5

A 500-word written response to one of the ethical issues raised in the first weeks of the course. Choose a specific case, event, or debate — a lawsuit, a policy change, a platform’s terms of service, an artist’s public response to AI. Argue a position. Use sources. This is not a summary; it is your informed opinion, and the Week 3 bias audit should give you something concrete to argue from.

Personal AI-Use Policy (5%) — Drafted Week 8, Finalized Week 14

A living document defining your own rules for AI in your creative practice. First draft due Week 8, revised Week 11, finalized and presented Week 14. The revisions are the point — your policy should change as your understanding does. Where the Ethics Position Paper argues about the field, this argues about you: what you will and won’t do, and why.

Weekly Assignments (20%) — Weeks 1–10

Small assignments designed to take one evening each, always pairing a making task with a noticing task. Submit in the Weekly Assignments database of your Notion journal with:

The work itself (images, video, prototype, code, writing)
Your prompts, verbatim, and the tools and model versions used (where the week involved generating anything — Week 1 does not)
A brief reflection (150–300 words): what you made, and what you noticed

Graded on effort, documentation quality, and reflection — not aesthetic perfection. Two weeks break the making/noticing pairing on purpose: Week 1 is all noticing, and Week 7 is all making — the midterm, presented that week, is the deliverable. Weeks 11–12 go light: midterm revisions and final project proposals occupy that space.

Midterm Project (20%)

AI-Directed Design

Design a complete visual communication project using generative AI as a creative collaborator. You choose the project type, the audience, and the design discipline. What you don’t choose is whether your decisions are defensible — every one of them should be intentional, documented, and something you can explain out loud.

The goal is not to make the best AI images. The goal is to show that you can direct AI toward a strong design outcome.

Pick a Lane

Brand identity · Poster campaign · Editorial design · Book or comic · Motion graphics · Illustration · Interactive prototype · Exhibition identity · Packaging · Data visualization · Wayfinding · Social campaign

Every concentration in the BFA has an option here. If your idea doesn’t fit any of them, bring it to the Week 6 workshop and make the case.

What You Turn In

Final design. The finished work, in whatever medium you chose.
Process book. This is the real assignment. Show me the ideas you abandoned, your prompts, your iterations, your failures, your revisions, your sketches and screenshots, and why you changed direction when you did.
Reflection, 300 words. One question: what could AI do well, and what could it never do for you?
Five-minute presentation. Don’t present your work. Present your decision making.

Final Project (25%)

Develop a portfolio-quality design project that explores your own position on AI in creative practice. It should demonstrate technical skill, but more than that it should show what you have come to believe about authorship, collaboration, and creative responsibility.

You can embrace AI, challenge it, misuse it, or reject it entirely. Any of those makes a good project, as long as the choice is intentional and you can defend it.

Where the midterm asked whether you can use AI to solve a design problem, this one asks what you actually think about it.

Some positions worth arguing with: AI should disappear, so build something that makes it invisible. AI is ruining illustration, so make the project that proves it. AI makes designers more creative, so show it. AI is terrible at typography, so go find out exactly where it breaks. AI is becoming a new creative medium, so treat it like one.

Territories

Design practice — brand system, campaign, editorial, packaging, interactive
Storytelling — short film, illustrated book, animation, comic, installation
Experimental — creative coding, tool building, generative systems, interactive installation, data visualization, speculative design
Research — bias, accessibility, copyright, creative workflow, AI literacy, visual essay

What You Turn In

The body of work. Not one polished artifact — enough work that someone can see the position you’re taking.
Process book. Show me the ideas you abandoned, your prompts, your iterations, your failures, your revisions, your sketches and screenshots, and why you changed direction when you did.
Your finalized Personal AI-Use Policy.
Critical reflection, 500 words, on authorship, ethics, and the role of AI in this work. Where did your policy hold, and where did this project push against it?
Director’s commentary, 3–5 minutes. No slides. Just you talking. Why did you make this? What surprised you? What failed? Where did AI help, and where did it get in your way? Which decisions were yours?

All final projects must include: the creative output; a process book documenting your workflow and iterations; and a 500-word critical reflection addressing authorship, ethics, and the role of AI in the work, connected to your finalized AI-Use Policy.

Using no AI at all is a valid answer — if rigorously argued. A no-AI project must still demonstrate, in its process book, that you understood what the tools offered and why you declined.

Grading

Component	Weight	Criteria
Tool Journal	10%	Consistency and honesty of weekly entries; end-of-semester synthesis.
Ethics Position Paper	10%	Clarity of argument, use of evidence, originality of perspective.
Personal AI-Use Policy	5%	Substance of revisions across drafts; final version connected to real project decisions.
Weekly Assignments (Weeks 1–10)	20%	Effort, process documentation, and reflection — the making task and the noticing task both count. Engagement, not aesthetic perfection.
Midterm Project	20%	Concept clarity, creative ambition, quality of AI direction. Process documentation graded as heavily as the artifact.
Final Project	25%	Creative output quality, process book rigor, and depth of critical reflection — including a rigorously argued decision not to use AI.
Participation & Critique	10%	Critiques, discussions, and the rotating current-events slot.

Assignment criteria for each grade level are posted on the class website: aixdesign.danne.design

Attendance

This is a studio course. Being present is essential — you will miss hands-on lab time and peer critique that cannot be replicated.

2 unexcused absences: grade drops one level
3 unexcused absences: grade drops again
4 unexcused absences: course grade of F

If you need to miss class, contact me in advance on Slack. Excused absences (illness, family emergency, religious observance) will be accommodated with documentation.

AI Use Policy

This course is about AI — you are expected and encouraged to use it. However, how you use it matters.

Your Personal AI-Use Policy assignment (first draft Week 8, finalized Week 14) is your own version of this document. By the end of the semester it — not this section — is the policy you stand behind.

Always document your prompts and the tools you used. This is required for all submissions.
You are responsible for the work you submit. AI is a collaborator, not a ghostwriter.
Written work (reflections, position paper, process documentation) must be substantially your own voice. Using AI to generate your written reflections defeats the purpose of the course.
Be transparent. If you used AI in a way that you are unsure about, ask — don’t hide it.

The goal is to develop your own creative judgment and critical voice alongside AI — not to outsource thinking. The most interesting work in this class will come from students who use AI as a thinking partner and push against its defaults.

Academic Integrity & Accessibility

Academic Integrity

All work submitted must be your own, with AI use documented as described above. Submitting AI-generated written analysis as your own writing, or fabricating prompt documentation, violates the CUNY Academic Integrity Policy and will be treated accordingly.

Accessibility

Queens College is committed to ensuring equal access to all students. If you have a documented disability and require accommodations, please contact the Office of Special Services and provide documentation as early in the semester as possible. Accommodations are arranged through that office, not directly through the instructor.

Title IX

Queens College and CUNY are committed to fostering a learning environment free from gender-based discrimination. If you experience harassment or discrimination, you may report it to the Title IX Coordinator or seek confidential support through the Counseling Center.