The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in design education presents both opportunities and challenges for developing future-ready graduates. This study investigates how final-year interior design students engaged with generative AI tools during a brief that required them to improve a previous submission by working on rendering quality, refining project presentation layouts, with the option of incorporating AI-assisted tools. Students explored platforms such as Midjourney, Photoshop, and Revit, concluding with a written reflection on their process. (Yanhua 2024) posits that “AI can transform interior design, addressing existing gaps and fostering a deeper understanding of the symbiotic relationship between advanced technologies and creative processes”.

Decolonisation has gained significant attention within South African public higher education, fuelled greatly by the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements of 2015 and 2016, with many institutions looking to address historical biases and promote a more inclusive curriculum.

Collaboration is recognised as essential in the process of solving large-scale complex problems and can therefore be observed in both the design industry and in design education. As part of design collaboration, design teams go through a process of framing the design problem, proposing potential solutions, and taking the steps required to produce an outcome. Framing, as originally defined by Schön (1999), provides a method to identify the decisions that a design team takes on their journey to establish potential design solutions. Ideally, for a collaboration to be successful design teams need to arrive at a share frame characterised by a common understanding of the problem, solution, and actions.