AI Inspired Sustainable (cardboard) city at Digitaltag Freiburg

Last week as part of a nationwide celebration of digital tools and technologies in learning environments, I ran a experimental workshop at the Stadtbibliothek (city library) in partnership with the city sustainability office. The idea for the workshop was to use an AI image generator (we tried out SchulKI for the activity) to create pictures of a eco-friendly future for Freiburg, print out mini stickers and then add the ideas to a giant cardboard installation.

There were a bunch of parts of the workshop (possibly it was a little too complex for the time that we had) but I think that each one of the elements added something to the learning experience.

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I wrote a bit about the process of generating prompts in a previous blog post and I thought it was interesting to see how workshop participants approached the topic. Several just put in their idea and used the first thing that came out and others were a bit more random jumping around with many different prompts. To me the images that are the most interesting though came from the people who iterated several times on an idea. I would be interested to think about how to more naturally support this practice of trial and error in this context.

I think adding the elements to the cardboard sculpture helped a lot to spark conversations and dialog between the groups. It was much easier to help people get started when they could see physical elements that others had made and at the end the installation looked really interesting.

There were a couple of technical issues that I would like to smooth out for the next time. The way to get the images to the printer was a bit clunky with a workflow consisting of downloading the image, adding to google drive, putting it on the ipad and then printing. As well the printers got too hot to run in the workshop making the process a bit slower.

All in all it was a really fun and interesting experiment to test out this combination of high and low tech projects. I think that it helped me continue to define some of the things that I care about when tinkering with AI (incorporating real world building, collaboration and not having AI offload the core tinkering process). I think that there still needs to be a bit of tweaking though to make the process more intrinsically motivating without so much reliance on what sometimes felt like disjointed external prompts (sustainable city, cardboard construction and iterating on AI image generation). It would be great to create an ecosystem where learners could more naturally dive into these elements.

Thanks so much to the local partners who helped with this Digitaltag workshop and looking forward to the next chance to explroe these topics.

Ryan JenkinsJuly 2, 2025digitaltag, freiburg, stadtbibliothek freiburg, cardboard city, AI, KI, image generation, generative AI, AI tinkering, eco-friendly, schulki, prompts