How AI is transforming design professions: a recap of a workshop at ESD Paris

Taking the time to reflect on our professions. Questioning our role as designers. It is with this intention that Éléonore Rident, senior product designer at Source.paris, intervened at ESD Paris to lead a week of workshops for the students of the Master's in Digital Design & Creative Technologies. An intense, critical, and stimulating moment to explore a future already underway: the one where artificial intelligence is redefining the contours of creation.

A workshop that evolves with its time

This is the fifth consecutive year that Éléonore has led this workshop week. And like the design professions, the content of the workshop has evolved significantly:

• In its early days, it focused on sustainable design and invited students to measure the environmental and social impact of their projects.

• A design fiction approach was then added to imagine desirable or critical futures, always with sustainability in the background.

• This year, AI was at the heart of the discussions. And to connect with previous themes: what stance do we wish to adopt in the face of these new technologies?

Imagining the future of creation with AI

For five days, from March 10 to 14, 2025, about forty students worked in teams to envision the future of a creative profession in 2030, whether in design, audiovisual, the music industry, or illustration, in the age of artificial intelligence. Their mission:

• Explore a profession, understand its current reality,

• Imagine its evolution with AIs (generative, agentic, team hybridization, disappearance of jobs…)

• And above all: take a position, provoke a debate, assert a clear point of view.

The design fiction approach allowed students to step off the beaten track, pushing them to project themselves into future scenarios that were sometimes utopian or dystopian.

“Students in work-study programs have little time to step back and reflect on their practices and learning. They do very few of this kind of exercise. Yet, it awakens a lot of useful questions for their future.”

Crossing perspectives: method and creativity

The workshop is co-led with Fabrice Starzinskas, head of the master's program, who has a very creative profile that complements Éléonore's. This collaboration offers students a framework that is both structured and open, where imagination can fully express itself without losing sight of the realities of the profession.

Éléonore adds:

“I do not consider myself a teacher. Students can now learn everything on the internet or with AIs. What we pass on to them is experience.”

And this experience is valuable. Because the profession of designer evolves each year. Staying in touch with younger generations also means staying alert, discovering new roles, new expectations, and new visions.

Design as a compass in a transforming sector

The design methodology used throughout the workshop has proven to be particularly valuable: agile, adaptable, it allows for the right tools to be mobilized at the right time. It becomes a compass in a context of constant technological change.

At the end of the week, a student reflects

“At first, it wasn’t easy to project into the future, but we learned a lot during this week about both the design methodology and the new technologies and the societal changes they induce.”

This workshop is proof of that: taking the time to rethink our professions is already making them evolve. And in a world where AI transforms creative practices, design remains more than ever a critical, strategic, and human lever.