Dezeen School Shows: a comic strip that examines AI's impact on designers is among the student projects by Parsons School of Design.

Also featured is a branding proposal for a make-up company and a project exploring how the creative industry may be affected by AI.

Parsons School of Design

Institution: Parsons School of Design at The New School
Course: Spring Program: Creativity in the Age of AI with Parsons – The New School and Adobe
Tutors: Parsons: Jeongki Lim, Julienne DeVita, Geoffrey Gertz, Zed Adams, Andrea Macruz, Killeen Hanson, Alicia Tam Wei and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo; Adobe: Brooke Hopper, Matthew Richmond, Hannah Elsakr, Jenna Melnyk, Dana Jefferson, Kelly Hurlburt and Christopher Azar

School statement:

"In spring 2026, Adobe and Parsons School of Design at The New School partnered to examine one of the most pressing questions facing creative education today: what does it actually look like to learn, create, and grow as a designer in the age of AI?

"Created as a shared space for inquiry, the program invited students and faculty across The New School to slow down and examine creative practice at a moment when new tools are constantly reshaping creative terrain.

"Designed for participants at all levels of familiarity with generative AI, the initiative supported dialogue and hands-on exploration across disciplines.

"Across three events – a university-wide symposium, a hands-on Creative AI Lab, and a final public exhibition – participants explored how the future of creativity is consciously shaped through responsible experimentation, collaborative inquiry, and human vision.

"Student projects span disciplines and methodologies – from hand-drawn illustration and custom corruption algorithms to iterative prompt refinement and speculative archiving – probing questions of authorship, cultural memory, and AI dependence through a range of print, digital, and campaign-based work.

"Taken together, the works reflect an emerging generation actively using, questioning and shaping a more intentional model for creativity in an AI-enabled world."

Sister Blister by Pallavi Chattoraj

"My work is centred on and around a decolonial lens to design cultures. In this project, I dream of a world that spotlights the pluriversal global majority's visual identities: unhindered, unhurried and unleashed.

"This was a week-long immersion to take an artistic vision from hand to AI, as a test run to see how memory and machine can push speculative dreaming of a world that, currently, lives only in my head.

"The theme of sisterhood has been recurrent throughout my work. This time, it is met with inspiration from form+make of Channapatna toys, a toy-making craft from India.

"This gave birth to the comic series called Sister Blister for this project and to see how far I can push the visual mediation from my hand to AI.

"From hand-drawn illustrations to using AI tools, this is an experimental arc that will fuel, guide and inspire further explorations."

Student: Pallavi Chattoraj
Course: Spring Program: Creativity in the Age of AI with Parsons – The New School and Adobe

Digital Arson by Octavio Martinez

"Digital Arson is a series of UV-printed travertine tiles, each the size of a smartphone, that fossilise fragments of contemporary phone interfaces built around my own illustrations.

"Each interface template is pulled through custom corruption algorithms, with meta commentary woven into the captions, comments, prompts and labels the screens carry.

"The series extends into tiles generated by Adobe Firefly trained on my illustration archive: jacks in the deck that fold authorship back on itself and ask where the artist ends and the model begins.

"This series draws on the burning of the Library of Alexandria as a metaphor for digital archival power.

"The work casts today's UX/UI systems as the modern scribe's hand and asks what survives, and what aura remains, when the platforms holding our images and language eventually collapse."

Student: Octavio Martinez
Course: Spring Program: Creativity in the Age of AI with Parsons – The New School and Adobe

Rogue: Carry on essentials campaign by Yaning Hu

"Rogue is an independent makeup brand I built entirely from scratch. For the Rogue: Carry On Essentials campaign, I used Adobe Firefly to explore AI-generated imagery as a medium for real world marketing.

"Through iterative prompt refinement and post-editing in Photoshop, I developed a series of campaign visuals that blend a playful, editorial sensibility with an authentic marketing perspective.

"The project includes two posters and a mockup, the first featuring an oversized lip gloss being scanned at airport security and the second a styled carry-on security bin with all the travel essentials.

"Together, the two posters capture a sense of chic effortlessness in the middle of a stressful situation, because with Rogue, you have everything you need."

Student: Yaning Hu
Course: Spring Program: Creativity in the Age of AI with Parsons – The New School and Adobe

untitled [zen for failing systems], 2026 by Isabella Tedesco

"The images are inspired by glitch art, zen koans and esolang. The site that these images are hosted on specifically has a broken layout and forces the user to interpret cryptic messages.

"These are two images out of many that came out of my different 'experiments' of the intersection of different possible intersections of creative expressions.

"The larger project is a commentary/speculative website archive of what human creative life might look like in a world where GenAI can generate, on demand, technically proficient work in any form.

"I anticipate that creative culture will increasingly centre on embodiment, process and community rather than technical perfection alone.

"There will be a shift towards smaller, niche communities organised around shared material practices, slow learning and idiosyncratic vision, while new forms of cultural evaluation emerge that prioritise authorship, context and the conditions under which work is made."

Student: Isabella Tedesco
Course: Spring Program: Creativity in the Age of AI with Parsons – The New School and Adobe

Time Again by Kiara Chang and Yash Sonwaney

"A question about our own entanglement with AI: what happens when AI as a support becomes dependence?

"Time Again borrows from the language and style of 1950s magazine advertisements to surface the new orders of behaviour, productivity and sameness that emerge, rendered in the distinctive aesthetic of risograph print.

"A critically reflective conversation about AI's social impact and our evolving role as designers inspired us to build a narrative around two objects: a ring watch Yash recently bought, and a seashell Kiara found in Peru almost fifteen years ago.

"The watch: a tool with the power to shape social order, mirroring the consultations we as a society are now having with AI and the way it influences how we act.

"The seashell: a multispecies inhabitant of Earth, unaware of the frameworks that organise human life, cast as the actor that unknowingly lets itself be consumed by the tool.

"We took this directly to Firefly boards, using sticky notes to ideate and map our storyline. We then fed that storyline into Claude, asking it to write an image prompt for each scene and describe it in our desired aesthetic style.

"Bringing the prompts back to the boards, we generated the images with Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT, iterating on the prompts and adding reference images of our objects to maintain creative vision, quality and consistency."

Students: Kiara Chang and Yash Sonwaney
Course: Spring Program: Creativity in the Age of AI with Parsons – The New School and Adobe

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and Parsons School of Design. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.