Why We Still Need to Pick Up a Pencil in the Age of AI with Nick Sousanis

**Why We Still Need to Pick Up a Pencil in the Age of AI | Nick Sousanis (The Unflattening)**

Nick Sousanis drew his PhD. His Teachers College Columbia dissertation was made entirely in comics and later published by Harvard University Press as The Unflattening. An Eisner Award winning comics artist and professor at San Francisco State University, Nick joins Aidan to make the case for drawing as a way of thinking, and for staying with the slow, scrappy struggle that AI tools now let us skip.

Nick tells the story of a class whose textbooks never arrived, and how he caught himself apologising to students who had in fact been learning plenty through making and play. That moment shaped his teaching mantra of study and play. The conversation moves through doodling and retention, productive failure, Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and why tight constraints so often release creativity. Nick also explains why copying and tracing can sharpen analysis, and shares his ongoing work to make comics accessible to blind and low-vision readers.

Find Nick at https://spinweaveandcut.com

Nick’s books on Amazon.ie https://www.amazon.ie/s?k=Nick+Sousanis

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One push back on the title. The pipe and parenthetical work on YouTube, but Apple truncates long episode titles in most views, so ”Why We Still Need to Pick Up a Pencil in the Age of AI with Nick Sousanis” may display better there. Your call.