Henney Hyehyun Ahn

Designing Designers for the AI Era: A Competency-Based UX/UI Curriculum from Day One

When AI can generate screens in seconds, what should we actually teach UX/UI students?

I'm a professor at a regional university in South Korea, preparing to launch a four-year UX/UI track in 2027 for students who will graduate into a world where most production tasks are automated. My plan: teach decisions, not just tools.

This spring, I tested that idea with sixteen third-year students who had never designed an interface. I started by teaching Figma, step by step. A month in, the AI tools were changing faster than my syllabus, so I changed course: tool learning moved to YouTube tutorials at home, AI use opened up, and class time went to each team's own app.

By the end, one team had a clickable prototype, two had complete interfaces, and one had fallen far behind. The team that went furthest barely used AI.

In this talk, I'll share what actually separated the teams, what I got wrong, and what it means for the curriculum I'm building next. Not theory. Field notes from one semester in a classroom in Gwangju, South Korea.

About Henney

Henney Hyehyun Ahn is a design educator, creative director, and studio founder based in Gwangju, South Korea. After eleven years in New York — working across advertising, publishing, and financial services at agencies including Publicis Groupe, Random House, VML, MCD Partners and DIGITAS — she returned to her hometown to join Gwangju University, where she is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Image Design. She also runs Biibiis, a design studio working at the intersection of visual design and emerging technology.

At Gwangju University, Henney is building a four-year, competency-based UX/UI curriculum from the ground up — one designed for students who will graduate into a world where most production tasks are automated.

Her teaching philosophy shifts the focus from tools to decisions: defining problems, testing hypotheses, and owning the reasoning behind every design choice. Most recently, she led students in a city-scale public media project where they photographed their surroundings, expanded the images using AI, and saw their work displayed on large outdoor digital billboards across the city — a reminder that design education can be, and should be, genuinely exhilarating.

She runs before dawn and photographs mountains. Sometimes at the same time.