Project Week Being Human: Graphic Design with Artificial Intelligence

Through lectures and seven workshops, this project week explored the relationship between graphic design and AI through co-creation, critical reflection, and a sustained curiosity about what makes our profession human-made.

Reflecting on the craft of graphic design

Our esteemed invited guests team up with our tutors and students to experiment with hardware, software, algorithms and datasets not to automate outcomes. The aim is to reflect critically on graphic design as a human craft and on how designers can meaningfully interface with machine thinking.

The project week is an initiative of and is produced by the Graphic Design office, heads and coordination Lauren Alexander and Chantal Hendriksen with Ingrid Grünwald and Marit van der Meulen.

Being Human: Day 1

The project week was introduced by the heads of the Graphic Design Department Lauren Alexander & Chantal Hendriksen.

Konrad Sierzputowski (professor of cultural anthropology) kickstarted the project week with a keynote lecture “Synthetic Transgression: notes on AI, Queer Materials, and Graphic Design”. His lecture highlighted the depiction and imagination of AI in cultural media, as well as pointing out the role of AI in the erasure of queer cultural specificity.

Our second keynote lecture was given by Graphic Design alum Vera van der Seyp. Vera explained what computational design through examples of her own work. She showed many impressive trials and errors from her practice and work as researcher at MIT, as well as education examples from multiple institutes around the world and her initiative, “Iterations", a platform and conference series.

Our third keynote speaker was media artist and theorist Ruben van de Ven. Ruben presented “Signal bodies; remodeling human movements in computational practices”. Ruben is PhD. candidate at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. He researches algorithmic politics through media art, computer programming and scholarly work; currently focusing on surveillance algorithms that order human gait and gestures. Ruben showed ways to navigate algorithms. How do you deal with them, once you understand how they are created?

Being Human: Day 2

On the second day we were honoured to host an online lecture-intervention within the workshop “The Ghost-Writer" lead by Benjamin Earl and Quentin Creuzet.

Next was Nicolas Malevé, who is currently a postdoc at SciencesPo Medialab and School of Law; a visual artist, data activist and computer science geek, who is interested in the socio-technical networks of artificial intelligence and their epistemic implications. In his lecture Nicolas shared his knowledge about the annotators, the ghostwriters, the invisible work done by “invisible” laborers. How do these algorithms and datasets come into play, and how is the interaction? We are looking to the world on the internet through a distorted lens.

Being Human: Day 3 — Workshops

After the lectures there were 7 workshops that students could choose from. The project closed with a communal tour to see the results of the workshops in the workspaces of Graphic Design. It was a vibrant and communicative week where all three years mixed together.

Synthetic Transgression: Notes on AI, Queer Materialism, and Graphic Design

Guest Tutor: Konrad Sierzputowski
Tutor GD: Phil Baber

This workshop investigated the tensions between generative artificial intelligence models and human-centered material production. The primary objective was to employ hybrid workflows that convert synthetically generated texts into self-published zines, thereby examining how manual intervention can transform disruption from a nominal synthetic effect into a concrete, collective mode of material production, resulting in substantive transgression.

Mapping x Embodiment

Guest Tutor: Aref Dashti
Tutor GD: Ellen van Assem

We move through The Hague every day, our attention and movements automated. We follow the same routes, notice the same features and landmarks, and move through the crowd guided by habits and statistics, much like algorithms do. This workshop proposes to break that routine, shifting attention from automated patterns to lived experience. Through counter-mapping, these embodied experiences have been translated into a visual language. The outcome of the workshop were visual maps, designed to be inefficient, personal, and experimental.

Towards Co-Creation

Guest Tutor: Katharina Nejdl
Tutor GD: Maarten Cornel

How does AI work? And how do we work with AI? As AI-driven systems become increasingly embedded in the graphic designer’s workflow; writing our text, generating our images, drafting our code, this workshop examined what it meant to co-create with these tools rather than simply operating them.

Rather than aiming for efficiency, we focus on the process: What should be automated, what should remain human, and how do we design not only with AI tools, but also shape how we interact with them?

What does a digital publication look like? What shapes do we take online? Can AI design posters? Katharina Nejdl deals with these and other questions in her work. As a graphic designer, developer and educator, she is interested in using digital technologies, such as web, AR and AI, as graphic tools. She also co-founded andshymagazine.com, an online literature magazine that explores new ways of reading, writing and publishing digitally.

Currently Katharina is researching coding as a tool for design and is building the grid-based parametric type tool grid-type.com. She teaches coding courses and gives workshops.

Ai, ai ai-ssignments

Guest Tutor: Lilian Stolk

Tutor GD: Pascal de Man

Whether we like it or not, AI is becoming embedded in our digital lives. From recommendation systems to facial recognition technologies, customer service bots, and algorithmic feeds, we interact with AI, often without even realising. But that doesn’t mean we have to accept it as it is. The question is less whether or not to use it, but how.

In this workshop, students contributed to the guide by creating an assignment that explored how to co-create with AI. Instead of seeing AI as a neutral or fixed tool, students were invited to treat it as a material, a collaborator, or something to question and push against.

The Ghost Writer

Tutor: Benjamin Earl
Tutor GD: Quentin Creuzet

Computer vision transforms how machines perceive visual information, fragmenting reality into patterns, objects, and semantic relationships. In the workshop The Ghost Writer, students become mediators between algorithmic sight and poetic language. Working across three days, students fed images to multimodal AI systems as a single medium of dialogue.

Generative Gestures

Tutor: Ruben van de Ven
Tutor GD: Jakob Schlötter

Drawing, writing, stroking, chiseling, tracing, walking, sawing, sewing — design is a practice of gestures and traces. Yet, when generating images with computers, we tend to stay stuck in the paradigm of pixels. In the workshop Generating Gestures the students explored how to think computationally in terms of lines and movements.

Speaking with your hands; Making type with gestures

Tutor: Vera van de Seyp
Tutor GD: Marina Chaccur

"Speaking with your hands" combined design principles with a little bit of coding, and real-time interaction between the physical body and digital typography through gestures. The goal of this workshop was to explore creative ways in which typography could be manipulated and animated in response to human movement, captured via webcam and processed with a pose estimation framework, focusing on the idea behind the interaction.