Title: Augmented creativity: AI in training tomorrow's designers

This article examines how generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is reshaping design education and the conditions under which it can genuinely augment—rather than standardize—students’ creativity. Building on a conceptual framework that links personalized learning, digital creativity, and transliteracy, the study argues that AI integration must go beyond instrumental tool use and instead support critical thinking, ethical awareness, and creative autonomy. The paper highlights key tensions such as the risk of homogenized outputs, “black-box” opacity, bias reproduction, intellectual property concerns, and the temptation of cognitive offloading that may weaken experimentation and reflective practice. 

 

Empirically, the article reports findings from semi-structured interviews with eight university design and arts educators in Tunisia (across several higher education institutions). Results show an ambivalent but generally open stance toward GAI: teachers value it as a creative assistant, productivity enhancer, and ideation catalyst, while stressing the need for revised assessment methods (including prompt-related competencies) and stronger institutional support for training and governance. To illustrate constructive, situated uses of AI, the paper presents the 2025 FAM project case study in Guermessa, where students used digital and AI-supported methods (e.g., 3D digitization/photogrammetry workflows and AI-assisted analysis) to preserve and mediate endangered Amazigh craft heritage through a virtual-museum-oriented approach. Overall, the article proposes that the most fruitful educational impact emerges when AI is embedded in project-based, critically guided pedagogies that strengthen learners’ creative agency and responsibility.