Design School Meets the Machine

The argument over generative tools can feel like a faculty-lounge parlour game when it stays inside the theory seminar. It stops being funny the moment it reaches the studio, where the work is graded on the hand as much as the head. Read on and wince at what the next accreditation cycle is about to do to design education.

The Council of Design Schools (CDS) is a member body based in Rotterdam that represents and advises degree-granting studio programmes. It also carries weight with the Board for Studio Accreditation, the reviewer that sets programme standards across 31 countries. So when the CDS tells schools to revise how they teach, tomorrow’s art directors are effectively obliged to listen.

The CDS recently circulated a draft describing a new “tooling and authorship” competency framework, and the language is doing a lot of quiet work. Students would be expected to demonstrate fluency with model-assisted production before third year, and to document, block by block, which parts of a submitted project they drew themselves.

Nobody in the working group will say out loud what the framework implies: that a portfolio is no longer a record of what a designer can make, but a ledger of what they chose to delegate. That is a defensible position. It is also a very different degree from the one on the prospectus.