ABSTRACT
Design education has long been grounded in a studio-based pedagogy, heavily dependent on design problems to which students must create formal and technical solutions. Such problems are usually defined by sets of constraints provided to stimulate thought and, often, to simulate (some kind of) reality. For a long time, this model seemed almost flawless: every year, students were faced with new challenges that, in the best cases, should exercise their abilities, promote their proficiency with processes and tools, and help them learn to think as designers. However, the recent shift from analogical to digital has drastically changed the way students behave in the face of a new design brief. Such changes, in both (im)material conditions and behaviours, must drive teachers to form new ways of presenting challenges to students. In this chapter, we reflect on some of these strategies, developed while teaching undergraduates. We present the case of a design challenge presented to first-year students: one without traceable existence online, defined through a prompt-generating-algorithm, that guarantees that each student has a unique, original, problem to solve.
