Gathering Schedule
10:00–10:30: Arrival and registration, with coffee or tea
10:30–10:50: Welcome, introduction
Rachel Gannon and Darryl Clifton
11:00–11:45: Workshop 1: AOI Industry Roundtable – What do emerging illustrators need?
As the illustration industry evolves, what challenges are graduates facing, and are they getting the support they need to build sustainable careers?
Join the Association of Illustrators for an open discussion exploring the changing landscape for emerging illustrators, from the impact of generative AI to the realities of entering the profession.
We want to hear educators' perspectives on what's changing, where the gaps in support are, and how the AOI can adapt to better meet the needs of the next generation of illustrators.
Rachel Hill and Alice Moloney (tbc)
11:45–12:30: Workshop 2: ‘so many shoes' - the role of the illustrator, empathy and humanity in contemporary illustration practice with Amelia Huw Morgan and Prof. Delyth James
What if illustration is a verb, not a noun? A verb suggests a continuum: something we do, not just something we make. In a post-AI landscape, this offers a different way to think about the discipline’s value.
This session explores the potential for illustration as a process and is developed from Amelia and Delyth’s collaborative research and draws upon embodied and cross disciplinary methods.
Amelia Huw Morgan, Senior Lecturer, Cardiff School of Art & Design + Prof. Delyth James, Professor in Pharmacy & Behavioural Medicine, Swansea University
12:30–13:30: Lunch
13:30–14:15: Visit to Exhibitions at Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration
14:15–15:00: Keynote: Prof. Rebecca Fiebrink
Demystifying generative AI: what it does well, where it breaks, and implications for arts education.
In this talk Rebecca will consider generative AI as a system based on pattern recognition and probabilistic prediction, rather than intelligence or truth. This will frame thinking on where tools like large language models are effective and where they fail.
Drawing on examples from the Creative Computing Institute, Rebecca will show how students and researchers are using AI to develop new creative practices while critically interrogating its limits. This work frames generative AI as a technology to engage with actively and critically, highlighting the vital role arts universities can play in shaping how these systems are designed, understood, and used in society.
15:15–15:30: Break
15:30–16:00: Reflections, looking ahead
Rachel Gannon and Darryl Clifton
Rebecca Fiebrink is Professor of Creative Computing at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, where her research explores how machine learning and AI can support human creativity, expression, and embodied interaction. She is best known for pioneering work in interactive machine learning and for creating Wekinator, one of the first widely used tools enabling artists, musicians, designers, and educators to build their own machine learning systems through demonstration rather than programming.
Her work brings together human-computer interaction, machine learning, music technology, and creative practice, with applications ranging from digital musical instruments and accessible interfaces to creative coding, games, and digital heritage. She has also led influential efforts in machine learning education for creative practitioners, including developing the world's first online course on machine learning for artists and musicians.
Before joining UAL, she held faculty positions at Goldsmiths, University of London and Princeton University. Her research has helped shape the fields of creative AI and human-centred machine learning, and her tools and teaching are used by artists, researchers, and students worldwide.
Amelia Huw Morgan is an Illustrator and Senior lecturer in Illustration at Cardiff School of Art & Design.
Amelia’s work and teaching focus on the action of the illustrated image in the world in hope of, ‘The Participant Viewer’. Amelia’s practice explores themes from fairy-tale, folklore and post-apocalyptic imaginings working with the ideas to build memory, nostalgia and identity she is fascinated in exploring how images speak, teach lessons and forewarn. Amelia has worked on projects using puppetry, shadows and object theatre, running and drawing at the same time, influenced by the itinerant storytellers of the Polish Szopka traditions, and very much by the rituals of a childhood lived through stories, plays and imagination.
In the last 5 years in addition to this Amelia and her students have been working on co-produced projects with NHS Wales Cardiff University and Swansea University exploring the illustrators' role in developing human illustrations as conduits, taking further the work on the participant building on empathy and responsibility from multiple empathetic and information perspectives.
Amelia’s work is colourful, sometimes frightening, bold and immediate; she describes her process as going into ‘a sort of trance of making’ only to be flung out by some worldly interruption from her imaginative dreamscape.
Amelia lives on the edge of the Welsh valleys, in a house with two front doors, with her husband Richard and daughter Petrofa.
Delyth James is a Professor in Pharmacy & Behavioural Medicine, based in the School of Medicine within the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Science. Her work adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, collaborating with other disciplines such as Psychology, Physiology, Health & Social Care, Digital Technology and Art & Design to address problems relating to medication use.
Delyth's academic career (in England and Wales) has focussed on close collaboration with clinicians, healthcare professionals and patients to undertake applied innovative research. Delyth's research draws on psychological theory and behavioural science approaches to address problems which are central to the way people take medication in society.
Her specific areas of interest are in developing visual communication resources to support medication-taking, designing complex interventions in healthcare, and educating professionals to conduct effective consultations to support behaviour change.
Delyth was elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (LSW) in 2025.