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Issue 43 • 2026
BACK THEN IS BACK NOW
DESIGN HISTORY AND EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF AI

Visual communication design has historically grounded its legitimacy in conscious practice: a cultural activity rooted in reflective processes, embodied competencies, and ethical responsibility toward the social, economic, and technological systems it operates within. Today we are witnessing a systemic transformation: generative artificial intelligence progressively hollows out these foundations, delegating to inscrutable algorithms the critical mediation that once lay at the heart of the discipline.

This issue interrogates what remains of the designer when visual production becomes automated. It does not merely document technology’s impact on artifacts, but probes the epistemological and educational consequences this transformation produces on design practice — mapping the methodological value of design history as a critical resource, the craft dimension of process as embodied knowledge, and the possibilities for transmitting these competencies within educational contexts.

Designers, historians, and educators document how the critical recovery of historically rooted practices in visual communication can restore agency and authorship to the designer in the age of AI, questioning how knowledge of the past might become a tool for imagining a future in which projective intentionality is not simply surrendered to an automated system.