How do we prepare students for a future shaped by AI without giving in to either techno-euphoria or techno-doom? What creative skills should we as educators be nurturing today, and how do we redefine the role of educators, artists, and designers in a world where machines increasingly generate content? As education systems and creative industries adapt to new and rapidly changing technologies, we find ourselves caught between two extremes: the promise of innovation and the fear of obsolescence.

This panel explores how the swift development of artificial AI is transforming the ways we teach, learn, and practice in the fields of arts and design.

Panellists include practitioners and researchers working across design, arts, science, and industry, who will discuss how these changes affect the way we understand reality itself, especially as digital tools challenge the idea of visual and audiovisual media as stable sources of truth. Drawing on their hybrid experiences, they will offer diverse perspectives on how to navigate this shifting landscape, and invite participants to reflect critically, and creatively, on the future of creative education.

Biographies

Heitor Alvelos

Heitor Alvelos is Full Professor of Design and Director of The ID+ Research Center at The University of Porto, Portugal, where he coordinates the Unexpected Media Lab. He currently serves as Vice-President of the European Academy of Design and is a Member of Academia Europaea and the European Science Foundation. Professor Alvelos has held prior posts in academic institutions throughout Portugal and internationally, including Course Director of the PhD in Design programme at The University of Porto from 2011 to 2024; Chairman of the Scientific Board (HSS) at The Foundation for Science and Technology from 2016 to 2022, Outreach Director for the Digital Media programme at The University of Austin Portugal from 2010 to 2014, and Senior Tutor in the Drawing Studio at The Royal College of Art, United Kingdom, from 1999 to 2001. Heitor has coordinated a wide range of national and international research projects since 2007 and throughout his academic career, including curation of the FuturePlaces Media Lab for Citizenship from 2008 to 2017 with the University of Texas at Austin, United States, and the recent FCT/H2020 project Anti-Amnesia: Design Research as an Agent for Narrative and Material Regeneration and Reinvention of Vanishing Portuguese Manufacturing Cultures and Techniques.

Susana Barreto

Susana Barreto is a researcher at LUME, Unexpected Media Lab and Associate Professor of Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal. In recent years, Professor Barreto has been involved in research projects focused on preserving specialised knowledge at risk of disappearance, specifically those embedded in the experiences of retired professors, artists, researchers, and practitioners in the arts, crafts, and design. Her research interests focus on the role of ethics in visual communication, design and crime, design culture, visual methodologies, and visual/history collections.

Paula Casal

Dr Paula Casal is a Professor in the Department of Law at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Spain. She has held teaching positions at Reading University and Keele University, United Kingdom. Professor Casal has completed fellowships at institutions across the globe, having served as Fellow in Ethics at Harvard University from 1999 to 2000; a Keele Junior Research Fellow, also at Harvard University, from 2000 to 2001; Hoover Fellow at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium from 2001 to 2002; Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom from 2002 to 2004; and Christopher Family Fellow at Stanford University, United States in 2018. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Ethics, Economics & Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Political Studies, and Utilitas. She is Associate Editor of Politics, Economics & Philosophy, and Law, Ethics and Philosophy. Professor Casal currently serves as Co-director of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics and as President of the Great Ape Project chapter in Spain. Her latest book, Los derechos de los simios (Trotta 2022) co-written with Professor Peter Singer, is forthcoming in English in 2025.

Carlos Alberto Scolari

Dr Carlos A Scolari is Professor in Theory and Analysis of Interactive Digital Communication in the Department of Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, where he coordinated the university’s PhD Program in Communication from 2018 to 2023. His research has focused on the new media ecology and evolution, interfaces, and transmedia narratives. He has been Principal Investigator of several projects, including the EU H2020 TRANSLITERACY project and the TRANSALFABETISMOS project through the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) from 2015 to 2018, and PLATCOM through the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) from 2020 to 2024. He is currently PI of the project LITERAC-ia with the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation & Universities (MCIU) from 2024 through 2027. His most recent books include Las leyes de la interfaz (Gedisa, 2018), Media Evolution with Fernando Rapa (La Marca, 2019), Cultura Snack (La Marca, 2020), La guerra de las plataformas (Anagrama, 2022), and On the Evolution of Media (Routledge, 2023), published in Spanish as Sobre la evolución de los medios (Ampersand, 2024). According to DIALNET, Professor Scolari is the most cited Spanish researcher in Media and Communication.

Joseph Haldane

Joseph Haldane is the founder, chairman, and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s global business and academic operations.

Dr Haldane has a PhD from the University of London in nineteenth-century French studies (ULIP/RHUL), and has research interests in world history and politics; international education; and governance and decision making. Since 2015, he has been a Guest Professor at The University of Osaka’s School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), and Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre since 2017.

In 2020, Dr Haldane was elected Honorary Professor of University College London (UCL) through the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, and full Professor in the United Nations Peace University's European Center for Peace and Development in 2022. A member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for global governance, he holds visiting professorships at Belgrade and Doshisha Universities where he teaches ethics and governance. He is a member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Professor Haldane has had full-time faculty positions at the Université Paris-Est Créteil, Sciences Po Paris, and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas), and the Schools of Journalism of Sciences Po Paris and Moscow State University.

Dr Haldane has been invited to speak at universities and conferences globally, including the UN HQ in New York, and advised universities, NGOs and governments on issues relating to international education policy, public-private partnerships, and multi-stakeholder forums. He was the project lead on the 2019 Kansai Resilience Forum, held by the Japanese Government through the Prime Minister’s Office and oversaw the 2021 Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned study on Infectious Diseases on Cruise Ships.

About the Presenter(s)
-Heitor Alvelos is Full Professor of Design and Director of The ID+ Research Center at The University of Porto, Portugal, where he coordinates the Unexpected Media Lab.
-Susana Barreto is a researcher at LUME, Unexpected Media Lab and Associate Professor of Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal.
-Dr Paula Casal is a Professor in the Department of Law at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Spain.
-Dr Carlos A Scolari is Professor in Theory and Analysis of Interactive Digital Communication in the Department of Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, where he coordinated the university’s PhD Program in Communication from 2018 to 2023.
-Joseph Haldane is the founder, chairman, and CEO of IAFOR.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule

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