Abstract:

The case study presented took place within the activities of the E³UDRES² project (https://eudres.eu/). This project comprises six international partner universities and aims to build strong and lasting alliances between universities across Europe to improve the European Higher Education Area, enabling a new generation of creative Europeans to cooperate across languages, borders, and disciplines to address societal challenges. Within the project, special course units are held, called I-Living Lab(ILL) in which teams of students from different universities propose to work on a challenge, following the Design Thinking methodology to develop "Future Skills".

The case study documents the pedagogical experience of conducting one of these ILLs that applied the Design Thinking methodology to develop an artistic project applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques.

This pedagogical experience happened between March and May of 2022 with students coming from different study programs and different European countries. The classes were exclusively online, with synchronous and asynchronous sessions, in a total of 30 hours of contact and 120 hours of autonomous work. The course followed the Living Lab paradigm, where the proposed challenge came from society and there was constant interaction with the stakeholder who proposes the challenge. The learning objectives were defined individually by each student, who selects a set of "Future Skills" that intended to develop, specifying the level of proficiency that proposes to achieve for each of these competencies. Each student builds a digital portfolio where is reported the products developed, and the tasks carried out that contribute to developing the target skills. The digital portfolio was a central element in the student's final assessment process. This ILL belongs to a set of ILLs in which the topic was the use of AI and response to the challenge proposed by the curator of Melk Abbey in Austria: - Create a video-mapping that would allow the spectator to relive the Baroque Art.

The ILL was organized in 6 weeks with 6 ECTS, following the five stages of the Design Thinking methodology:
(1) Presentation and Introduction;
(2) Emphasize: Explore the Melk Abbey space virtually, learn about Baroque Art, explore video production tools and interview the curator of Melk Abbey;
(3) Define: Present and discuss ideas of “how to bring Baroque art into the 21st century" and identify different types of artistic and AI techniques that can be applied;
(4) Ideation: Definition of the concept and the story of the video to be produced; distribution of the tasks to be carried out by the various team members.
(5) Prototype: Production of the partial videos and assembling them to build the final video.
(6) Test: Presentation of the video to the curator of Melk Abbey. Adjust and improve the video. Preparing Pitch and Poster for the final session.

The ILL was attended by 5 students from 4 different institutions, one of the students dropped out, the remaining, three finished with an A level (excellent), and one with a B level. Communication, Self-Efficiency, Innovation, and Reflection were the "Future Skills" that were identified by the students as having been the most worked on. On 4 June 2022, at the International Barocktage Stift Melk, the students presented the video-mapping produced entitled "Bringing Baroque Art to 21st century". This public presentation receives nice and enthusiastic feedback from the audience.

Keywords:

European Universities, Design Thinking, Artistic Project, Living Lab.