By 9 a.m., the mood had shifted from Day 1’s big questions to Day 2’s lived practice. 

The halls buzzed less about which model to try and more about who we must become to use any model well. 

If yesterday asked what keeps us human, today answered: our inner powers or the habits of mind and heart that no system can automate. 

What unfolded felt like a studio-wide rehearsal for the Four Pillars of Creative Power: Imagination, Expression, Risk-taking, and Reflection.

The morning: skills that don’t show up on a resume—but decide your future

Miguel Elasmar started with a provocation: in a transitional era, the way forward isn’t just more “hard skills”, it’s what he called (semi) soft skills. 

In UX, product, and systems work, he argued, the advantage is moving toward the adjacent: business fluency, communication, product sense, time stewardship, systems thinking. He laid out a “periodic table” of these powers the way Victor Wooten maps groove notes and listening, dynamics, and space and made the case that, as automation “equalizes” outputs, these human capacities become differentiators.

Then Timothy Nohe asked an uncomfortable question: is AI becoming the fast fashion of art? 

He traced a line from Harold Cohen’s AARON to today’s “AI slop,” and held up the cultural mirror: when output is easy, kitsch proliferates. The takeaway wasn’t a scold; it was a dare: 

how much of you is in the prompt? 

In other words, are you directing or decorating? That’s Pillar Expression with a side of Risk-taking: resist lowest-common-denominator novelty; insist on authorship.

Kari Weaver, PhD followed with a masterclass in curiosity. As a social scientist and teacher-educator, she showed how curiosity dampens anxiety, invites complexity, and drives genuine learning. 

She named the inhibitors we all feel: fear, assumptions, over-reliance on tech, and offered dialogic practices that restore agency: critical reflection, co-construction of knowledge, and power-conscious conversation. 

You could feel the room breathe. This was the Pillar of Reflection operationalized: as shared practice in classrooms and studios, so people feel safe enough to ask better questions and take bigger risks.

Midday: story, direction, and voice in an era of machines

With Alireza Vaziri we stepped beyond the frame into how visual narratives are changing. The work was quietly insistent: students making decisive choices with AI in the loop, refining approaches rather than surrendering them.

Mary Fiore made it visceral. Trained as a traditional painter, she moved to digital tools after a physical condition changed how she could work. 

Her case represented how AI can help shape chaos if you step into the role of creative director. Mood boards, profiles, and improvisation are instruments of intention. “None of the tools replaces vision,” she stressed.

Krista Faist then turned language into light. In an interactive installation demo, words, gestures, and images formed a live loop, a conversation between body and system. 

Watching semantic segmentation respond in real time made a simple point beautifully: Expression in the age of AI is often co-authored. The human role isn’t diminished; it’s curatorial, choosing constraints, shaping attention, and composing meaning across modalities.

Afternoon: diversity, truth, and attention as design materials

Mehrdad Sedaghat Baghbani asked the room to confront the lens itself: whose imagination is the model using? 

He named the consequences of Western-centric datasets, misrepresentation, cultural erasure, and a colonial aesthetic, and called designers to be active shapers, not passive users: advocate for inclusive corpora, intervene at the level of training, not just prompting. 

Bruce Fraser, Ph.D. closed by reframing the “deepfake” problem. He asked us to notice that deception often lives less in the file and more in the narrative around it, the mind as a narration engine. Through embodied attention exercises and playful image tests, he emphasized reclaiming attention as a civic skill. Play wasn’t escapism; it was method. 

What Day 2 taught us (and how it sharpens our workshop)

Thread the day together and a single story emerges: as automation spreads, the venue of creativity moves inward and then outward again with more authority. The speakers, in chorus, showed how to live the Four Pillars:

• Imagination — see beyond roles and tools (Elasmar), beyond frames (Vaziri), beyond single traditions (Sedaghat), and into new forms of mutual presence (Winger-Bearskin’s spirit echoed here).
• Expression — insist on authorship amid abundance (Nohe), direct the work like a conductor (Fiore), co-compose with systems while keeping the through-line of human meaning (Faist).
• Risk-taking — mutate the studio, don’t abandon it (Paulsen yesterday, Elasmar today), merge disciplines (UX + PM), try processes that might fail.
• Reflection — cultivate curiosity that reduces fear (Weaver), reclaim attention to resist narrative manipulation (Fraser), and build ethical scaffolds that let diverse cultures speak for themselves (Sedaghat).

So when we gather for “Beyond the Algorithm: Preserving the Human Spark,” our work together is clear: we’ll practice these powers. 

You’ll identify your “most-you” work and the life that animates it. 

You’ll name a risk small enough to try this week. 

And you’ll leave with language to direct AI in service of your voice, your community, and your craft.

Day 1 gave us the “why.” 

Day 2 gave us the “how.”

Tomorrow, we do.