Graphic Design History Lab: Teaching Critical AI Literacy Through Archival Practice in Design Education

This article reports on an experimental seminar held within the Master’s Programme in Product, Communication and Interior Design at University Iuav of Venice, conceived as an initial effort to formalise an AI-assisted procedure for cataloguing graphic design artefacts. Forty-seven students catalogued a corpus of computing and technology magazine covers spanning the 1970s through the 2000s, using a web platform that queries AI models via API. The seminar opened with a theoretical lecture introducing the conceptual tools for visual analysis, after which students built a cataloguing schema by hand. This sequence addresses a specific disciplinary problem: graphic design lacks both a systematic methodology for visual analysis and cataloguing standards adequate to its materials. AI-driven completion of the schema followed, testing whether the tool was viable in this setting. Pre/post Likert questionnaires and the resulting CSV files reveal three significant effects: students abandoned the expectation that AI outputs could be used without revision; they recalibrated their self-assessment around the distinction between description and interpretation; and they came to recognise, in retrospect, the critical value of having built the schema manually beforehand. The findings suggest that this sequence offers a replicable pedagogical model for introducing computational tools into humanistic disciplines that lack established methodological infrastructures.