iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 19h

So the 60th year is a decent moment to change what appreciation means. Give teachers room to work with attention rather than reporting pressure. Defend their judgment when someone wants a number where a reason belongs. Protect the conditions first, then send the card.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 19h

UNESCO says the world needs 44 million more teachers by 2030. Hard to recruit people into a craft while stripping out what made it a craft. The autonomy, the time, the trust that their judgment counts for something.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 19h

Then AI made it obvious. When a machine can generate the polished output, the output stops proving that anyone learned anything. What remains is the person. Whether they can observe, question, correct their own thinking. Teachers build that. The reporting system cannot even see it.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 19h

Over those same 60 years, institutions learned to reward what can be measured. Judgment measures badly. Independence measures badly. So teachers get pushed toward producing tidy evidence instead of forming people. The card still arrives every October.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 19h

The durable thing a teacher produces is a person who can see, judge, and act on their own. That capacity forms slowly. It needs attention, honesty, and a kind of trust that does not show up on any dashboard.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 19h

October 5, 1966. The ILO-UNESCO recommendation on the status of teachers. Sixty years later, more than 100 countries plan events under the theme of standing with teachers. School boards tell communities to say thanks. Which is nice, genuinely. It is also the easy part.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 19h

The world honors teachers one day a year, then automates their real work. In 2026 the day turns 60. Those 60 years did something strange to the job.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 20h

So judge the environment by whether a student can watch another mind work before it knows the answer. Protect whatever makes that possible. The desks were furniture all along.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 20h

When a university tells me the studio moved online successfully, I ask what stays visible there. Finished files, mostly. Screen shares of decisions already made. A submission system wearing the name of a studio.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 20h

The whole thing depends on unfinished thinking staying visible. Half-made work on the table, wrong turns included. On Teams the work arrives already resolved. The route that produced it stays private. And the route was the part worth watching.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 20h

Then they return to their own work and quietly change their mind. No feedback form. No learning outcome ticked. Nobody in the building even knows it happened. That is the studio.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 20h

A student is stuck. Two desks over, a peer reaches the same problem by a route the student would never have taken. The student watches it happen. Says nothing.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 20h

For years I assumed the learning happened in the critique. It happens earlier than that. It happens while nobody is officially teaching anything at all.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 20h

It took me a long time to say what a studio actually teaches. Decades, honestly. The answer was never written in any curriculum I worked with.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 22h

Design is not something we switch off when the working day ends. It is a way of seeing, questioning and responding to the world. Education should cultivate that capacity, not merely prepare students to produce portfolios. heretakis.medium.com/design-is-no...

heretakis.medium.com

Design Is Not a Job. It’s a Way of Being.

Some ideas from my conversation with Mike Dempsey RDI

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 22h

Innovation does not begin in a laboratory. It lives in workshops, streets, communities, inherited crafts and improvised solutions. Education must learn to recognise the intelligence already present in the world. newartschool.education/2026/07/03/t...

newartschool.education

The Future Was Already There: Reading Nettrice Gaskins’ Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation

Nettrice Gaskins’ Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation is one of those books that quietly changes the ground beneath your feet. At first glance, it appears to be a book about STEAM education…

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 22h

The question is not simply whether students should use AI, but when. Assistance introduced before judgement has developed can replace the very experience through which judgement forms. Timing is not a technical detail. It is pedagogy.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

One student drew the same radiator nine times. The ninth one finally looked warm. Her laptop stayed closed the whole morning and nobody told her to close it. That is the convergence Frayling meant, as far as I can tell.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Heart is the part teaching drops first. I hold it as answerability. Every choice in the file must be one the student can defend at the wall, in person, with the screen off. When they know that is coming, the choices change before I say a word.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The sequence carries the whole thing. Notice before you decide. Decide before you produce. The laptop comes in where it extends what the eye already caught. A lens, a scan, a slow comparison of two drawings. If a step would skip the looking, that step waits.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

So now the brief starts from a capability, named out loud. This year it was noticing. Three mornings drawing the same corridor. Nothing to hand in yet. That part confuses them more than any software ever has.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The usual move is to ban the device for the first weeks. I tried that. The hands went quiet and the attention went with them. Students waited for the ban to lift. The ban trained waiting, which was worse than the laptop.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

He describes craftsmanship as head, heart and hand converging in one act. For years I asked what that means for a brief when the screen is already there on day one. It took me a while to admit the old answer was gone.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

My first years open laptops before they read the brief. Frayling keeps coming back to me when I watch it happen.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

What should happen before the prompt? John Cash's #PapertoPixel offers a powerful answer: the hand should act before the algorithm. Material first. Observation first. AI should respond to developed human experience, not replace its formation. heretakis.medium.com/what-happens...

heretakis.medium.com

What Happens Before the Prompt? John Cash, Paper to Pixel and the Future of Design Education.

Artificial intelligence has not created the crisis in design education. It has exposed it. Long before generative systems could produce…

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The danger is not that AI will think like humans. It is that designers will continue thinking like machines: repeating trends, responding automatically and mistaking borrowed taste for judgement. Art school should interrupt that sleep. newartschool.education/2026/07/04/d...

newartschool.education

Design Education in the Age of Sleep Machines

Most people do not design. They repeat. They repeat what they have seen, what they have been rewarded for, what their tutors praised, what the industry currently desires, what the algorithm amplifi…

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

As design becomes bigger, AI, systems, cities, data, health, mobility, the designer must become bigger too. Not in software skills, but in perception, judgement, culture and responsibility. Bigger technological systems require deeper human formation.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Keep the friction in. When a tool offers to remove the effort, check what that effort was building before you accept. In my studio the answer has stayed the same for 35 years. The effort was building the student.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

So now I ask for the path. What they tried. What they threw away. Why the third version got rejected. Development lives in that trace. The finished piece on its own tells me very little.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

What bothered me came later. They skipped more than the assignment. The task existed to change them. The object was almost a byproduct. Remove the effort and the change never happens, no matter how good the file looks.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

A student can now bypass all of that discomfort in twenty seconds. Maybe forty, the one who did it in front of me took about forty. The output looked finished. Honestly it looked better than their earlier work.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Friction feels like failure when you are inside it. Mistakes, dead ends, a wasted weekend on a direction that collapsed. That effort is the learning. Without it nothing in the student actually moves.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The rule: the struggle stays in the assignment. If a brief stops resisting, I rebuild it until it resists again. The difficulty is deliberate. I put it there on purpose.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

After 35 years of teaching design, one rule has not moved. Students push against it every year. I keep it anyway.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Archives resist the instant answer. They ask students to search, handle evidence, follow connections and understand who decided what was preserved. My conversation with Lauren Alexander asks why this slower form of inquiry matters more than ever in the age of AI. www.buzzsprout.com/1969986/epis...

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

What cannot be automated in design education? Lauren Alexander points towards judgement, cultural literacy, curiosity and the ability to make surprising connections. My new article asks what education must now protect. heretakis.medium.com/what-cannot-...

heretakis.medium.com

What Cannot Be Automated

Lauren Alexander on design education, archives, making and the human capacities we need to protect

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hold care to that standard. Build the demanding conditions. Accept the cost. And stand behind what you make, because someone else has to live inside it.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

There is one sentence I ask students to carry out of the studio. Design is never neutral. Every choice shapes what becomes possible for someone else. A typeface, a form field, a default setting, each one decides something for a person who was never in the room.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Softness does not pay that price. Rigor does. Rigor means demanding work, repeated criticism, and the expectation that the student can defend every choice they made. Students read this correctly. They always know whose attention is real.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

That kind of care costs something. It costs recognition. It costs validation. I have held this position against the current for seventeen years. I counted again this morning to be sure. The payment arrives late, on the day a student stops needing you.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Real care has a definition I can be held to. It means wanting the student to become the best version of themselves. That version is already visible in their work, in their tendencies, in their inclinations. An educator who imposes an imagined version is using the student as material.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Follow the attention instead of the vocabulary. The papers get written. The conference talks get polished. The student sitting with an unresolved project gets whatever energy is left over. That is a choice, even when nobody names it as one.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Care is the cheapest word in design education right now. Saying it costs nothing. I want to write about what it costs when it is real.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

You become the designer you practise being. Every day you practise attention or distraction, courage or compliance, patience or speed, judgement or dependence. Education is not merely preparation for work. It is the formation of the person who will do it. heretakis.medium.com/the-designer...

heretakis.medium.com

The Designer You Practice Becoming

Advice for Young Designers in an Age of Speed, Noise, AI and Hollow Professionalism.

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

If AI can produce the output, art & design education must become clearer about what it exists to develop in the person: observation, judgement, material intelligence, agency and responsibility. The work matters. What the student becomes matters more. newartschool.education/our-comitmen...

newartschool.education

Our Comitments

The New Art School exists to protect and develop the human purpose of art and design education. We are living through a profound change in creative practice. Artificial intelligence can now generat…

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

What should design schools teach when the “real world” keeps changing? Simon Collins argues for curiosity over certainty, learning over knowing, and education that connects imagination to responsibility rather than chasing software. designeducationtalks.buzzsprout.com/1969986/epis...

designeducationtalks.buzzsprout.com

Simon Collins - What Design Schools Get Wrong About the Real World - Design Education Talks

Simon Collins is one of the most internationally experienced figures working at the intersection of design education, creative leadership and innovation. His career spans global brands including Nike,...

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Lefteris Heretakis @heretakis.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Do not automate an educational experience before you understand what it develops. The real question is not whether students should use AI, but when AI becomes an amplifier of human capability rather than a substitute for its formation.

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