The Illustration Educators subject association invite you to participate in a vital, multi-modal research project exploring the impact of Generative AI on creative arts education.
How is the creative higher education system broken by this technological shift, and how might we creatively work within those breaks?
Rather than adopting a polarising ‘ban it vs. embrace it’ position, we are using concepts of productive failure, institutional isomorphism, and extitutional practice to examine the spaces of friction and raw opportunity within our organisations.
Below is an overview of who we are, the process, and how we hope you will contribute.
Who We Are
We are Darryl Clifton (Illustration Programme Director, UAL:CCW) and Rachel Gannon, (Head of School of Design, Kingston University) co-directors of the subject association, illustration educators. It is in this capacity that we are conducting this research. This project directly responds to a shared recognition and concern amongst illustration educators that our creative conventions, modalities, and pedagogies are currently in total flux.
Process & Format
We are conducting an institutional ethnography of creative HE through a series of conversational, open-ended interviews. Because we want to capture the lived, human reality of this moment, the primary output of these interviews will be a short experimental film, accompanied by an introductory presentation and a post-hoc visual essay/paper which will be presented at the Illustration Research Conference in November 2026.
We want to focus on individual experiences, specific examples of pedagogical failure, and experimental thinking. During the conversation, we may also invite you to respond to specific visual prompts or metaphors (such as the concept of the ‘fissure’ or ‘gap’ in institutional structures).
What are we asking?
We would be incredibly grateful if you would participate in an interview with us.
Format: Either in person or online.
Duration: Approximately 45–60 minutes.
Dates: We are scheduling interviews on Friday 14th August, Monday 24th August and Friday 11th September
Ethics & Consent: We will provide full ethical clearance and participation/consent forms prior to filming. You will have full transparency over how your contribution is framed.
Areas to Explore
We will share a more detailed outline before the session to help you prepare, but our conversation will revolve around four core thematic areas:
Conventions in Flux: What it means when our traditional creative and professional modalities begin to fracture.
The Institutional ‘Doom Loop’: Navigating the tension between rigid university metrics (which demand a performance of certainty) and the messy reality of current studio practice.
Productive Failure: How we can nurture failure as a critical pedagogy and resist reductive definitions of success.
Extitutional Spaces: Where the organic, radical, or rogue dialogues and experimentations are actually happening outside formal structures.
Contact Darryl Clifton and Rachel Gannon for further details mail@illustrationeducators.org
