Today we're releasing the results of a case study that we've been running for the past year at Hochschule Niederrhein in Germany.
This collaboration is among the first of its kind in Germany for generative AI and design education.
Since 2025, design students at the university have been working with an enterprise solution from LetzAI. The impetus for this partnership came from Creative Director and visual artist Ümüt Yildiz, who built on a development that had already begun early at the university: Prof. Thorsten Kraus has been teaching courses in Generative Design & AI there since 2018. After LetzAI proved itself in the classroom over the past year, the university decided to expand the partnership strategically.
At art and design schools, the decisive question is no longer whether students use generative AI. What matters is how they understand the technology, apply it creatively, and question it critically.
Hochschule Niederrhein is thus among the first universities in Germany to systematically integrate generative design into design education, and has continued to build on this profile ever since.
At the applied level, this is reflected in the course taught by Ümüt Yildiz: the Creative Director and visual artist teaches coding at the Design department of Hochschule Niederrhein and has integrated LetzAI into his teaching since 2025. His course combines technological innovation with concrete creative practice.
Rather than discussing generative AI only in theory, for the past year he enabled students to apply the technology directly in their own projects, experiments, and visual processes, making them ready for the job market.
From trial to partnership
The university recognized early on that this approach worked in the classroom. Students were able not only to get to know the new technologies and workflows, but to develop, through direct application, a deeper understanding of their possibilities, limits, and implications.
Based on these positive experiences, we're excited to share that the partnership between Hochschule Niederrhein and LetzAI was expanded further for the years 2027 and 2028, with a clear goal: to give the designers of tomorrow the best possible education.
This partnership and ÜmütYildiz's course illustrate that future-ready teaching cannot wait until technological change is fully complete or conclusively evaluated. That is precisely the university's ambition: to create spaces where students can try out new systems, question them, and help shape them creatively.
Hands-on experience as the highest value
Especially during the formative years of study, hands-on experience cannot be replaced by anything else. Only through practical work do students learn how an idea can be developed, steered, discarded, and improved using generative systems.
LetzAI provides a platform for generating and editing images and video for exactly this purpose. Alongside a range of AI models, it enables work with reference images, custom visual models, and collaborative workspaces, among other things. The enterprise access creates a shared technical foundation for teaching: students work with professional tools under real production conditions, while access, resources, and models can be organized centrally.
This creates a protected learning environment in which processes are understood, not just results produced. Students experience AI not as an automatic answer machine, but as a system that demands orientation, precise decisions, and a clear creative stance.
Three new questions for design education
The use of AI does not only answer questions. It also raises new ones:
- What do students need to learn when creative production becomes ever easier through AI, but evaluating the results becomes more demanding?
- How can one's own creative contribution be assessed when a human and a generative system work together on a result?
- How can curricula become flexible enough to integrate new technologies without introducing an additional course for every new tool?
These questions are also central to the whitepaper „Design ist das Mittel. Kommunikation ist der Zweck. – White Paper zur Reform der Kommunikationsdesign-(Aus)Bildung“.
The whitepaper was published in June 2026 as part of the ADC Creative Campus Research by the Art Directors Club für Deutschland (ADC). It was written by Prof. Richard Jung, Board Member for Research and Teaching at the ADC and also a Professor of Communication Design at Hochschule Niederrhein.
The whitepaper is based on Jung's many years of work in research and teaching, ongoing exchange with creative practice, and a survey of 239 ADC members.
The whitepaper treats AI not as an isolated add-on topic, but as a fundamental shift in design education. The more generative systems simplify and automate production, the more important problem analysis, conceptual ability, judgment, and responsibility become.
This is confirmed by the accompanying ADC member survey: the creatives surveyed agreed almost unanimously with the thesis that as AI drives increasing standardization, judgment and responsibility become more important.
These findings are aligned with our case study at Hochschule Niederrhein.
From producer to creative decision-maker
For design education, generative AI opens up new possibilities. It can be used in research, in building visual worlds, in developing ideas, and in working out complex image concepts.
Within a short time, numerous variations emerge. The real creative achievement increasingly lies in comparing these results, evaluating them critically, and developing them further with intent.
This also changes the role of designers. The ability to generate images alone is not enough. What matters more is a clear creative stance, precise decisions, and an understanding of why a particular solution works.
The example of Hochschule Niederrhein shows how this can work in practice: he brings his experience in creative direction and visual art into a course where AI is not treated as an isolated tool. Together with his students, AI is actively shaped, varied, and developed in different directions, rather than simply applied as a finished tool. The whitepaper offers a fitting term for exactly this approach: it explicitly understands AI not as a tool, but as “formable material” that students learn to shape, vary, and apply with intent. A description that captures this teaching approach precisely.
New tools require new responsibility
Alongside these creative possibilities come new challenges: Which data may be used? How is authorship made visible, and how are references credited? What aesthetic biases does a model reproduce? And when does automation support an idea, versus merely replacing a deliberate creative decision?
Universities are thus becoming important laboratories for the responsible use of generative technology. Here, students can experiment, analyze mistakes, and develop their own positions before working with these systems in agencies, studios, or companies.
Education for a changed professional world
The expanded partnership between Hochschule Niederrhein and LetzAI shows how a single practical impulse can grow into a long-term educational model. The university's approach combines technological openness with creative responsibility: students learn not only what is possible with generative AI, but also how to make decisions, put results into context, and use the technology for their own ideas.
Generative systems replace neither concept nor craft. They expand the toolbox and change what professional design will mean in the future.
"Technology creates possibilities. The designers of the future must learn to choose the right ones."
Ümüt Yildiz
Ümüt Yildiz is a Creative Director, visual artist and lecturer for Creative Coding at the Design department of Hochschule Niederrhein. Based in Cologne, he has been exploring artificial intelligence in visual design since 2018. Alongside his teaching, he works with artists and brands on AI-driven imagery.
