Context

Our goal for you in the MPS CD program is that you grow as a designer. Looking back in 1 year, we would like you to be amazed by how far you've come and what you are now able to do. As one MPS CD alum wrote, "The program gave me so much more confidence as a designer and helped me grow in ways I didn’t even know I needed."

This means that you will have: deepened your fundamental understanding of design; refined the concrete skills needed to work in the industry; cultivated a substantial body of work that demonstrates your unique perspective.

For this to happen, you will need to learn. And the problem is that each of you has, in your pocket and on your computer, a magical machine — fast, convenient, and cheap — that will automate all of your work, and thereby all of your learning, if we let it.

So, what do we do?

Principles

These are a set of principles to guide our collective AI use across all tasks/projects/courses in the MPS CD program. We expect your use of AI to be:

Critical

Tools are not neutral; they carry inherent biases and limitations as a result of the conditions in which they were made. We ask you to be critical: to understand what can and cannot be verified about the tools you are using and to respond thoughtfully.

Across the span of the program, we ask you to demonstrate this criticality by creating and maintaining a document which lists each AI tool you have used, and to reference this document when submitting projects.

For each tool, you will list:

• the tool's terms of service and data retention policy,
• who the vendor's paying customer is,
• what the vendor will and will not disclose about how the system was built,
• how your own goals differ from the goals of the people offering it,
• and how the above details actively inform your work

Start with this Google Docs template

Transparent

We trust that you will use AI in appropriate ways to support your work and learning. In return, we expect that you are transparent about your AI use: i.e. that you always disclose which parts of your work were generated by AI, which were produced solely by you, and which lie somewhere in the fuzzy space between.

For each project, we expect you to include a "how it was made" narrative that outlines the tools that you used and their specific contributions to the final output. We may also ask you to supply further details, like chat transcripts, in certain cases.