Designing Learning Experiences in a Post-ChatGPT World

This post was taken down on 26 October 2026. A revised version will appear at this address.

About the original

Transcript of a talk delivered at LXDCON’25 on June 12, 2025. The original ran to about 1,706 words and 32 images.

Abstract

Generated by Claude, a language model, from the original text; not written by the author.

Starting from ChatGPT’s impact on higher education, it contrasts Ethan Mollick’s adapt-and-redesign optimism with Ian Bogost’s realist diagnosis of a crisis that technology cannot fix, using Harvard’s StatGPT Slackbot as a running example. It proposes “Conscious Adaptation”, built on three strategies: institutional realism, loss-conscious innovation, and keeping solution-building and critique as distinct but mutually informing work. It ends with three imperatives for learning experience designers: protect meaningful human effort, design for real institutions rather than ideal ones, and recognise the limits of design.

Published by

Kars Alfrink

Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.