Issue Introduction

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

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence is profoundly reshaping the landscape of visual communication design. Automated systems capable of producing images, typographic compositions, and simulating style, structure and even concepts within seconds challenge long-established design practice and education assumptions about design principles, methods, strategies, authorship, and professional expertise.

If at the end of the last century, the role of communication design was considered crucial in structuring user experiences capable of managing the complexity of social, cultural, and economic dynamics through processes of critical mediation between knowledge and action (Bonsiepe, 1999; Maldonado, 1971), today, in contemporary AI-driven media environments, this function is increasingly dislocated to new forms of automated and often uncritical visual production. In this scenario, the transformation of design practice is progressively calling into question the role, authorship, and epistemological foundations of design practice (DeTroy, 2026; Manovich, 2019; Somaini, 2023). Designers are asked to select, refine and drive the circulation of possibilities generated by algorithmic systems rather than to produce original visual forms. For many designers and students, this technological shift has generated a growing sense of uncertainty. If visual artefacts can be generated almost instantly, what remains of the knowledge, skills, responsibility and processes traditionally cultivated within professional practice and absorbed within educational environments?

Compounding the gradual erosion of the designer's role by an algorithm invested with inscrutable authorship is the progressive renunciation of ethical responsibility for design choices, the automation of which sacrifices their intentionality.

This moment of technological transformation thus requires design discipline to reconsider its foundations, since design – as scholars such as Victor Margolin and Adrian Forty have argued – can't be defined solely by its final outcome, rather as a cultural activity embedded in broader social, economic and technological systems (Forty, 1992; Margolin, 2002).

In this perspective, revisiting the history of graphic and communication design becomes a way to recover and foreground the temporal, material, and reflective dimensions of design practice, to emphasize and make transparent the processes of exploration rather than instantaneous making and to reassert the role of experimentation, iteration, definition of constraints and possibilities in the development of ideas. The past does not simply represent an archive but becomes a potential methodological resource (Margolin, 2017) and historical research can reveal how design processes unfold, how decisions are negotiated, and how visual communication responds to technological and cultural change. Recent thoughts on design education have similarly emphasized the importance of reconnecting design history with contemporary practice (Rittner, 2020). Especially for students and younger designers, engaging with and deconstructing the processes behind artifacts for the first time can reveal alternative approaches to visual thinking, experimentation, and communication, making these artefacts appear unexpectedly contemporary.

At the same time, renewed attention to historical processes resonates with another crucial dimension of visual communication design practice and education: its craft dimension and the understanding of the processes and tools that structure its production. Within visual communication design, the project is a processual negotiation between thinking and making (Adamson, 2007), where knowledge is materially and operationally constructed through iterative acts of production (Sewell and Johnston, 2019). In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett defines craftsmanship as an "enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake" (Sennett, 2008: 9); within visual communication, this impulse translates into a thoughtful and conscious engagement with tools, media, and techniques – analogue or digital – through which meaning is shaped. As argued by scholars such as Johanna Drucker (1994) and Ellen Lupton (2004), graphic design practices historically operate at the intersection of intellectual structuring and material execution. Craft, in this sense, does not merely refer to manual skill but to a form of knowledge embedded in the relationship between visual thinking and communication practice.

The call "Back Then Is Back Now" therefore invites a critical reflection: how can the knowledge of design history and craft-based approaches, and the recovery of processes and ways of thinking historically rooted in the practice of visual communication – and their transmission and critical reinterpretation within design education – contribute to redefining agency, authorship and responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence?

 

REFERENCES

Adamson, G. (2007). Thinking Through Craft. Berg Publishers
Bonsiepe, G. (1999). Interface: An Approach to Design. Dawn Barrett
DeTroy, H. (2026). Design authorship in the AI age. NC State News. https://news.ncsu.edu/2026/01/design-authorship-in-the-ai-age/
Drucker, J. (1994). The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923. University of Chicago Press
Forty, A. (1992). Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750. Thames & Hudson
Lupton, E. (2004). Thinking with Type. A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors & Students. Princeton Architectural Press
Maldonado, T. (1971). La speranza progettuale: Ambiente e società. Einaudi
Manovich, L. (2019). AI Aesthetics. Strelka Press
Margolin, V. (2002). The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. University of Chicago Press
Margolin, V. (2017). World History of Design. Bloomsbury
Rittner, J. (2020). Teaching design history. Medium (SVA MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism). https://dcrit.medium.com/teaching-design-history-e0ad6c5fd72c
Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. Yale University Press
Sewell, J. E. & Johnston, A. S. (2019). Rethinking History in Design Education through the History of Materials. Platform. https://www.platformspace.net/
Somaini, A. (2023). Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture. Grey Room, 93, pp. 74–115. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00383