Positive Feed-Forward: The Use of Generative AI for Visual Storytelling in Design Ethics Education

This article describes and evaluates a visual storytelling assignment developed for an undergraduate design ethics course. By using AI-based image generation for speculative storytelling, the assignment shifts student engagement from analytical critique toward hopeful, future-positive speculation. Drawing on solarpunk–an optimistic, eco-futurist ethos centered on sustainable and just futures–the project asks students to envision desirable worlds and identify the changes required to realize them. The article outlines the course background, its aim to foster constructive optimism, and the assignment structure–including assignment themes and a pilot study. It then presents selected student works and their reflections. This is followed by a discussion of the ethical dilemmas inherent in using AI, such as environmental cost, devaluation of creative labor, lack of transparency, potential for disinformation, and intellectual property infringement. In a cybernetic twist, these dilemmas are themselves treated as subjects of design ethics. The article argues that the question of whether to adopt AI in design ethics education is, in principle, undecidable and must be personally addressed by educators. It concludes by framing design ethics not as a state to be achieved, but as a perpetual, aspirational practice that is both enabled and challenged by emerging technologies.