Mentoring the AI Curious
This month, I’ve been mentoring in Designlab’s AI for UX and Product Design course, a four-week program that helps designers explore how artificial intelligence can enhance creativity and transform their design process.
Each week focuses on a different part of the UX journey, from research and ideation to prototyping and storytelling. As a mentor, I give feedback on student projects and lead a Friday peer group session with ten designers from all kinds of backgrounds and experience levels. It’s a mix of career switchers, visual designers, and UX veterans, each bringing their own perspective to the table.
Learning Through Teaching
Teaching AI design feels a lot like designing itself, full of questions, experiments, and surprises.
Every week, I review student work and find myself rethinking my own process. What role should AI play in discovery? When does it enhance creativity, and when does it risk flattening it? The students I mentor approach these questions with a curiosity that’s contagious.
Some are pushing AI tools to generate new visual directions. Others use it to speed up user research or brainstorm interaction models. Each approach teaches me something new about how designers are redefining creativity in real time.
Designing With Ethics in Mind
A major theme of the course is AI ethics, not as a box to check, but as a way of thinking.
We talk about bias, transparency, authorship, and the responsibility that comes with automation. When students present their work, I ask them to consider:
Who benefits from this product?
Who might be left out or harmed?
How can we make the role of AI clear to users?
These questions don’t have simple answers, but that’s what makes them valuable. The goal isn’t to teach designers to avoid complexity, it’s to help them navigate it.
The most thoughtful projects often come from students who don’t just use AI for speed, but to explore why something should exist at all.
A Room Full of Curiosity
Our Friday sessions have quickly become my favorite part of mentoring. There’s a spark that happens when ten designers come together with shared curiosity. Someone shows how they used ChatGPT to synthesize interview data. Another walks through a prototype built with Figma AI. Someone else raises the question of whether AI-generated imagery still counts as design.
The best moments happen when someone changes their mind, when an idea expands because of another person’s insight. Those exchanges feel like a glimpse into where design education is headed: collective, conversational, and deeply human.
The Human Side of AI Design
Even in a course about artificial intelligence, what stands out most is how human the work still is. The tools may be new, but the heart of good design—empathy, storytelling, and intention—hasn’t changed.
Mentorship reinforces that truth. It’s a reminder that learning design isn’t about mastering every new tool, but about building the judgment to use technology thoughtfully.
Looking Ahead
As AI becomes part of every designer’s workflow, mentorship and ethics will only grow more important. Designers need space to pause, question, and think critically about what they’re creating.
That’s what this program offers, a community that learns together. And for me, it’s a chance to see how the next wave of designers are shaping the future of our field with curiosity, empathy, and care.
AI might be changing design, but it’s people who decide what kind of change that becomes.
