Back in January I wrote about my typographical designs where letters do double duty and how I was collaborating with Claude to create poetic/verbal responses to my designs. What started as simple visual puzzles—like "THINK INFINITY" with the shared "IN"...
Human Creativity to the Power of AI: The Event
When Nicole Oster, Lindsey McCaleb and I were discussing the design of DCI691: Human Creativity × AI in Education before this semester started, we envisioned a space where we (students and faculty alike) could collectively explore the fascinating boundaries between...
Designing for Creative Learning: New book chapter
I'm excited to share my recent work with colleagues Richard West, Jason McDonald, and Melissa Warr exploring how instructional designers can intentionally foster creativity through Gl?veanu's 5A Framework. It was published in the prestigious Oxford Handbook of...
Play—I: Blog post by Team AI
Below is Team AI's blog post for my Human Creativity x AI for Education class. As always, I have not edited their post in any way. You can read the previous posts by following the links here: Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5; & Post 6 This was a great way to...
The Mirror and the Machine: Navigating the Metaphors of Gen AI
A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Eamon Costello to present a talk at the Education after the algorithm: Co-designing critical and creative futures conference being held in Dublin. And no, I didn’t get to go to Dublin for my talk—had to do it from here in...
The Promise & Paradox of Creative AI: A Presentation
I'm excited to announce my upcoming presentation at the Second International Seminar on 'Design Education in the Post-AI World' taking place tomorrow (Saturday) at the Centre for Design Studies in Indore, India. This seminar holds special significance for me as it's...
Dewey or Don’t We Care? Addressing the Novice’s Dilemma in Learning with GenAI
In my previous blog post on the Microsoft Research study about GenAI and expertise I ended with a troubling realization that GenAI may not be the best options for learners. As I wrote "This analysis raises particularly thorny issues about AI use in education. If...
When Ghalib meets AI: One student’s experiment
In my previous post about rediscovering Ghalib through metal and rap, I mentioned sharing his work in my creativity class. What I didn't share was the remarkable ripple effect this had. Every week, students take turns writing reflections on our class discussions and...
The Hidden Metal in Ghalib’s Heart
Mirza Ghalib, was a celebrated poet who lived in Delhi in the 19th century Delhi. He was as famous for his wit and defiance of conventions as he was for his verses. He mostly wrote ghazals—a form of lyric poetry built of rhyming couplets, each standing alone yet...
From Yawn to Yeah!: How I Got an AI to Stop Being So Darn Serious
As part of my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education, students were randomly assigned to Teams A through E. One of their first tasks? Create team names starting with their assigned letter. So we ended up with with teams AI, Brainstormers, Catalyst, Dreamers and...
The Avengers, Creativity & the EdTech Midgame
If last week we had Bollywood, could Hollywood be far behind? Here is the fourth blog post from students in my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education, documenting what we do each week. The only edit I made to their post was including the image and description of...
Code, Kathak, and Confusion: A Story of Learning with GenAI
One of the students in my Human Creativity x AI in Education class is an accomplished Kathak dancer and last week we got into a discussion of how she could bring this personal interest into projects we were exploring in the class. How could GenAI help? So yesterday,...
Creativity x GenAI: Week 3
The second blog post from students in my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education. (You can see the first post here). Just in case you are wondering why this is week 3 and not week 2, we lost one class due to MLK Day. These posts are an ongoing record of what we...
Human Creativity & AI in Education: Week 1
This semester I am teaching a course titled Human Creativity x AI in Education. We have 19 students in the class, split into 5 groups. (And yes though I love prime numbers, having one more participant would have been better). Each week one of the groups will document...
Double Vision: A Creative Dance of Typography & AI
I love playing with type and words. Recently I got obsessed with creating a particular kind of typographic design—layouts where letters in words do double duty. A simple example is given below: “THINK INFINITY” where the shared letters "IN" span both the words....
Call for Papers (Special Issue) on GenAI, Games & Learning
I'm excited to announce a special issue of Education Sciences that I'm co-editing with Dr. Ashish Amresh, Lindsey McCaleb and Nicole Oster, focusing on the intersection of generative AI and game-based learning in learning. As generative AI reshapes education and...
Oops! Double Trouble with Double Dactyls OR Learning from AI’s Creative Mistakes
As headlines swirl about AI chatbots misrepresenting Anne Frank (Schools Using AI Emulation of Anne Frank That Urges Kids Not to Blame Anyone for Holocaust) and Apple canceling its AI news summaries due to accuracy concerns (Apple pulls error-prone AI-generated news...
The Dance of Entropy: A Transdisciplinary Exploration
One of the ideas we have been exploring in my transdisciplinary creativity class this semester, is that of how generative AI can serve as a bridge between seemingly disparate fields. In this post, I want to share the results of an ongoing experiment demonstrating the...
Welcoming 2025: A Final Reflection (& Calling an End to a 16-year Tradition)
Since 2008, our family has been creating short videos to celebrate the start of a new year. Each video is crafted from household items and usually includes some form of typographical optical illusion. Today, we share our sixteenth, and final video—a deceptively simple...
When Truth Doesn’t Matter: AI Falls for Illusory Optical Illusions
I've been exploring ChatGPT's ability to analyze images, and the results have been impressive. From interpreting complex refugee statistics to conducting semiotic analyses of street art, the AI has shown a remarkable ability to extract meaning from visual information....
To thine own mind be true: Understanding cultural technologies, from cave walls to ChatGPT
For almost 12 years now we have been writing a column series for the journal TechTrends, exploring the intersection of technology, creativity, and learning. Recently, my colleagues and I have been diving deep into generative AI through conversations with scholars like...
New Course | Human Creativity x AI in Education: A Transdisciplinary Exploration by Design
DCI 691 (Spring 2025)Human Creativity x AI in Education: A Transdisciplinary Exploration by DesignInstructor Dr. Punya Mishra (punya[AT]asu.edu)Mondays 9 – 11:45 Tempe Short description This graduate-level course examines the dynamic interplay between human creativity...
Can Machines Stink? A Touring Test of Human Exceptionalism
My friend Leigh Wolf sent me the Journal of Imaginary Research's 2024 call for abstracts (note, abstracts not papers) on the theme of "Flourishing." Do check out the journal. It IS a hoot! I do plan to submit something to the journal. I mean how cool would that be......
Finding In/Sight: A Recursive Dance with AI
In this post, I share a conversation with Claude.AI (my words in purple, Claude's in blue) that began as a playful exploration of visual wordplay. What emerged was something unexpected - not about AI's lack of consciousness, which was never in doubt, but about the...
Many Voices, One Song: Orchestrating Polyphonic Learning
In music, polyphony describes a texture where multiple independent melodic voices interweave to create something greater than the sum of its parts. The philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin expanded this idea to human discourse, seeing it as a way for multiple voices and...
Building Character: When AI Plays Us
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." These words from Martin Luther King Jr. speak to something fundamentally human – the belief that...
Kern You Believe It? A Typographical Tango with AI
As someone who enjoys playing with images, words, and typography, I'm always seeking new ways to generate ideas. I recently tried an experiment: collaborating with an AI language model (Claude) on a series of typographical designs. It all started after I had created...
From Clairvoyant Fish to Static Earths: Scientific Dialogues with GenAI
In my previous post (From Shortcuts to Simulations: Two Contrasting Uses of AI in Higher Education), I shared how my colleague Jim ingeniously used AI to prepare for a difficult conversation about academic integrity. Today, I want to explore another fascinating...
The Conscious Suspension of Belief: Getting Smart about Human-AI Interaction
A classic tale of early cinema recounts the 1896 Paris screening of the Lumière brothers' "L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat" (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station). According to popular accounts, some viewers reportedly reacted with panic to the realistic...
NotebookLM’s Viral Secret: It’s All in Our Heads
Google's recent release of NotebookLM has stirred up quite a buzz, particularly its podcast feature. At first glance, it might not seem revolutionary—after all, we've had AI tools that can engage with uploaded documents for a while now. And it does not require...