The Unbearable Lightness of Prompting: A Critical Reflection on the Environmental Impact of genAI use in Design Education

The paper states that while design educators support students in skillfully using GenAI tools and in critically scrutinizing the ethical and social issues around these technologies, the issue of environmental sustainability remains unaddressed. Relative to existing discussion of ethical and social issues around genAI, this work explicitly brings environmental sustainability into the concerns of design education. This is a problem framing explicitly stated in the abstract, an argumentative claim rather than an empirical measurement.

The paper critically reflects on the energy costs of using genAI in design education, using a workshop held in 2023 with 49 students as a motivating example. It takes a concrete teaching workshop as the starting point for reflection rather than arguing in the abstract alone. The abstract explicitly gives the workshop year (2023) and the number of participants (49 students), but reports no specific measurements of energy consumption.

The paper develops a set of five alternative stances, with related actions, that support the conscious use of genAI in design education. It moves from diagnosing the problem to offering a framework of stances and actions that educators can adopt. The abstract explicitly states that it develops "a set of five alternative stances, with related actions," making this a conceptual framework contribution.

The work contributes to design and HCI by bringing together ways for educators to reflect on their practices and by informing the future development of educational programs around genAI. It links the environmental cost issue to the design of educational programs, pointing toward future curriculum and program development. The abstract describes its contribution as addressed to the design and HCI fields, a positioning statement.

This work is aimed at educators in design education and human-computer interaction, and applies to settings where courses and programs around genAI are being designed with attention to environmental costs; its reflection is motivated by a 2023 workshop with 49 students, and the five alternative stances and related actions are intended to support the conscious use of genAI.

The abstract reports no specific energy consumption figures, measurement approach, or comparison baseline for genAI use, nor does it explain how the five alternative stances were validated or adopted in teaching; moreover, the loaded text is the arXiv bibliographic record page and does not include the body, figures, or tables, so details of the workshop process, the stances, and the action list remain open questions.