Author – Tuan-Ting Huang
Craftsmanship has long held a central place in art and design history. While often associated with form and aesthetics, its deeper emphasis lies in dedication, tradition and quality-in the care and attention given to the process of making. As technology accelerates and productivity becomes a dominant cultural value, design movements have emerged to resist this pace. Slow technology, for instance, encourages mindful engagement with products (Hallnäs & Redström, 2002), while speculative design and design fiction invite audiences to imagine alternative futures (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Bleecker, 2009). Yet both still centre primarily on the perception of the audience and on how the work is received or interpreted. Craftsmanship, by contrast, turns inward: it concerns the mode of practice, the values and sensibilities embodied by the maker in the act of creation. It asks not what is made, but how it is made, and how that process shapes the maker themselves. In the context of design education, this focus on practice makes craftsmanship particularly resonant: it cultivates an attitude, a rhythm and a sense of responsibility toward making that extends beyond outcomes.
But how do we teach students to develop such a mode of practice? The rise of AI has unsettled the very grounds on which we assess intelligence, creativity and originality. For educators, this shift touches everything from curriculum design to grading rubrics. What skills will remain relevant when machines can generate form, text or imagery in seconds? Amid this uncertainty, qualities that connect to the body and the senses-the tactile pleasure of shaping materials, the rhythm of repetitive gestures, the mindfulness of making-gain new significance. As Malcolm McCullough (2007) states that skill is sentient: it involves cognitive cues and affective intent. To rethink about design education, we might therefore return to craftsmanship, to practices that engage the head, hand and heart (Cheatle & Jackson, 2023). Traditional design education has long cultivated the head and hand, through learning software, modeling and prototyping. But the heart-the maker’s attention, care and affect, is what distinguishes human from mechanical production. Renewing this “heart” in design education invites us to reconsider what counts as learning and growth. It shifts attention from outputs to processes, from products to practices. From this perspective, it’s important to highlight several interrelated values in craftsmanship that can illuminate this moment in AI and design education: the embrace of risk, the cultivation of rhythm and flow, the ethics of care and responsibility and the sense of communion in shared practice.
Values in Craftsmanship
David Pye (1968) described craftsmanship as the “workmanship of risk”, where the quality of the result is continually at stake during the act of making. This element of risk is not a flaw but a condition that keeps the maker alert and engaged. It contrasts with the predictability of automation, where the production of an algorithm tends toward sameness, while the maker attends to differences in the repetition of practice (Ingold, 2006). In the context of AI, embracing risk can help students learn to navigate uncertainty rather than eliminate it-to see each encounter with a model or algorithm as a negotiation, a space for adjustment and interpretation, rather than accepting AI’s output or feeling helpless before its black box. Risk, in this sense, becomes a pedagogical tool: a way to restore agency and curiosity in a landscape increasingly distorted by the pursuit of speed and productivity.
Tim Ingold (2006) describes this attentiveness to difference as a form of rhythmic flow: each repetition is adjusted in response to material and circumstance. This rhythmic attunement is not automation but attention, a flow that grows from experience and within context. In design education, this rhythm can be reimagined within digital or computational practice: the rhythm of prompting, debugging, revising and iterating alongside AI systems. Such rhythms suggest an alternative cadence for creative work with AI, one that counters the frictionless, efficiency-driven interfaces of most tools, and instead puts conversation between intention and response in the foreground.
This responsive relationship positions AI as a design material (Dove, Halskov, Forlizzi, & Zimmerman, 2017; Holmquist, 2017), a notion increasingly explored in emerging design research. Seeing AI as material invites the same care and responsibility that makers bring to wood, clay or fabric. The hours of looking, touching and refining cultivate ethical attention. In the digital age, theories of digital craft (Cheatle & Jackson, 2023; McCullough, 1996) emphasise that craftsmanship remains a unity of head, heart and hand even in computational contexts. Historically, art and technology have often been separated by a “disjunctive conjunction”: beauty versus usefulness (Hirszowicz, 1985). The spirit of craft collapses this binary, shifting continually between utility and aesthetics (Paz,1973). This interchange restores sentience to technology and inspiration to form.
Working with AI from a handicraft, human perspective extends further into a sense of communion. Making is seldom solitary; it is sustained by shared rhythms of learning and exchange, which becomes a collective practice with materials, tools and other makers. In design education, this spirit of shared making can reshape how we think about collaboration with AI: not as competition between human and machine, but as co-learning across different forms of intelligence. Such collective practice also extends to educators, who, like makers, must continually rework their tools, methods and criteria of judgment alongside evolving technologies.
What does it mean for AI in education?
Craftsmanship reminds us that learning is not only about acquiring tools, but about forming relationships, with materials, technologies and with one another. In this light, the role of design education is not simply to prepare students to use AI efficiently, but to help them cultivate an ethic of attention: to slow down, listen and attune. By renewing the values of craft with risk, rhythm, care and communion, educators can create spaces where making becomes a dialogue rather than an execution, where AI is approached not as a shortcut but as a companion in thought.
While craftsmanship does not automatically translate into the context of AI, it invites us to intentionally design how AI enters educational practice. A pedagogy informed by craftsmanship resists the instrumental logic that dominates much of our technological culture, in which efficiency, optimization, and prediction are treated as unquestioned goods. Instead, it encourages students to inhabit uncertainty as a constitutive condition of making and exploration. From a craft perspective, learning does not emerge through the elimination of indeterminacy, but through sustained attentiveness to it. Like makers who develop skill through ongoing negotiation with material resistance, students encounter AI systems not as neutral tools, but as situated actors with limits and biases. Designing AI for this context therefore means valuing not only the ability to generate outcomes, but the capacity to respond thoughtfully within students’ unfolding learning processes. Such a stance foregrounds responsibility, patience, and care as core values, and calls for forms of assessment that honor process, relationality, and reflective practice over measurable outputs alone.
In the age of AI, to teach design through craftsmanship is to reclaim making as a form of knowing. One that cultivates the skills through making, alongside uncertainty, while deepening attentiveness in action. It is also a gentle reminder that creativity has not only the capacity to generate, but the capacity to care.
References:
Bleecker, J. (2009). Design fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction. Near Future Laboratory. https://systemsorienteddesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/DesignFiction_WebEdition.pdf.
Carpenter, J. R. (2014). Handmade web. In L. Emerson (Ed.), Reading writing interfaces: From the digital to the bookbound (pp. 15–36). University of Minnesota Press.
Cheatle, A., & Jackson, S. (2023). (Re)collecting craft: Revising materials, techniques, and pedagogies of craft for computational makers. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7(CSCW2), Article 250, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610041.
Dove, G., Halskov, K., Forlizzi, J., & Zimmerman, J. (2017). UX design innovation: Challenges for working with machine learning as a design material. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 278–288. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025739.
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT Press.
Hallnäs, L., & Redström, J. (2002). From use to presence: On the expressions and aesthetics of everyday computational things. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 9(2), 106–124. https://doi.org/10.1145/513665.51366.
Hirszowicz, M. (1985). Industrial sociology: An introduction. St. Martin’s Press.
Holmquist, L. E. (2017). Intelligence on tap: Artificial intelligence as a new design material. interactions, 24(4), 28–33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3085571.
Ingold, T. (2006). Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Process of Skill. In J. R. Dakers (Ed.), Defining Technological Literacy (pp. 65–80). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983053_6.
McCullough, M. (1996). Abstracting craft: The practiced digital hand. MIT Press.
Paz, O. (1973). The use and contemplation. PsicoArt, 4(4). https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2038-6184/4217.
Pye, D. (1968). The nature and art of workmanship. Cambridge University Press.
Further Reading/Watching/Listening:
Hodgson, Justin. Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic | Books Gateway | The Ohio State University Press.
N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics | Books Gateway | The University of Chicago Press.
Image Attribution
Generated by: Better Images of AI
Date: 2025
Prompt: “A woman sits at a computer console from the 1950s in a vintage computer lab. One window possesses columns from Nevile’s Court at Trinity University at Cambridge University, and the other window depicts six potted flowers and sunlight. The background is black and white, and the image of the woman and the sunny window are warm tones.”