The University of Melbourne's Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning has launched an innovative student showcase that deliberately shifts focus away from polished final projects to highlight the experimental design process itself. The initiative, called MSDx Winter, represents a direct response to the rise of artificial intelligence in design, emphasizing the human creativity and complexity that AI cannot replicate.
MSDx Winter serves as an ongoing experimental platform that spotlights students' design processes throughout their mid-year term, "revealing the raw, messy and real work of design." Unlike traditional showcases that display completed works, this initiative encourages students to share their unfinished projects and openly acknowledge the complexity and mistakes that characterize their design journey. The platform celebrates ideation and the evolutionary nature of creative work, demonstrating how ideas develop and respond to various challenges.
The showcase features unfinished ideas preserved in sketchbooks, early-stage prototypes, material experimentation notes, and documentation of thought processes. These displays reveal the cultural, social, and political contexts behind students' designs – elements that are typically hidden in conventional student exhibitions. By exposing these underlying considerations, the university aims to demonstrate the "humanness" and depth of experimentation that drives meaningful design work.
According to the faculty, which incorporates the Melbourne School of Design, this approach has become more crucial than ever in an era of generative artificial intelligence that is fundamentally reshaping design education. Faculty members explain that while AI can produce plausible designs, images, or complete bodies of work within seconds, the process by which it creates these outputs "is often opaque and its outputs derivative." This limitation highlights the irreplaceable value of human creativity and intentional design thinking.
Despite this shift in showcase philosophy, the University of Melbourne maintains that it is critically engaging with AI technology, actively exploring both its limitations and potential applications. However, university officials emphasize that AI lacks the capacity to engage deeply in the comprehensive design process that requires cultural awareness, ethical considerations, and collaborative problem-solving. The MSDx Winter platform serves as a demonstration of these uniquely human capabilities.
The initiative also reflects a broader transformation in the university's approach to design education, placing greater emphasis on hands-on making, collaborative work, and meaningful discussion. This educational evolution includes increased attention to the "footprints" that designers leave culturally, politically, and economically through their work. The university is working to ensure students understand their responsibility and impact as future design professionals.
"We are increasingly placing emphasis on revealing the people, ideas, and values embodied in the work; the material, cultural and political systems behind buildings and places; the before-and-after flickering either side of the image, whether in the seminar discussion, sketchbook, or code fragments that produce it, or the living places and material futures that emerge from it," said Dan Hill, director of the Melbourne School of Design. Hill emphasized that design is inherently a work-in-progress, much like the people and places it serves.
Hill further explained the philosophy behind the showcase: "Design is always a work-in-progress, as people and places are also work-in-progress. So 'showing our workings' is something we celebrate." This approach represents a fundamental shift in how design education presents student achievement, prioritizing process learning over product perfection in an age where technology can instantly generate superficially impressive results.
