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.