Indranil Ujagare

Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly transforming higher education, yet its eco-social costs of energy intensity, water use, and human labour remain underexplored. At University of the Arts London (UAL), student GenAI usage grows despite limited awareness of these impacts (Sherwood, 2025; Ujagare, 2025). While UAL (2022)’s Our Position Statement on AI provides baseline guidance, it can emphasise eco-social justice and participatory design. This project therefore reframes AI adoption as a design management opportunity: How might design through eco-social lens cultivate ethical AI literacy within UAL’s digital learning ecosystem?

The insights unfolded over a year through a multi-method process. An E-STEEPLE Analysis with De Bono’s (n.d.) Six Thinking Hats was applied to interrogate the AI economy, supported by primary research on student GenAI usage and awareness gaps (Ujagare, 2025). 

Speculative design tools like Complete Sight (Hunt, n.d.), Trend Triangle (Healy et al., n.d.), and Transition Pathway (Terry, 2017) (Fig. 12, Appendix) were used to envision a future ‘Earthism’ where AI supports eco-social equilibrium by 2050 (Ujagare, 2025), (Fig. 4, pg. 3). This project elaborates one of the several proposed design interventions – an outcome across policy, product, and system design – a redesigned wireframe of UAL (2022)’s Our Position Statement on AI, in collaboration with UAL’s Digital Learning Practice (DLP) team, as a steppingstone to this future. 

All proposed design interventions (Fig. 22, Appendix) seek to embed eco-social commitments into institutional practice and pedagogy.  

Please refer the attached PDF for all the above references.