Google Fellowship — The Intervention

The Intervention (Refined)

Why "intervention," not "solution": an intervention is the specific mechanism you introduce into an existing system to change an outcome. Here, that's the CPA workflow and verification step I'm inserting into the classroom. The underlying workflow is already proven, it's what produced 21 Young Ones awards, a Gold Cube from the Art Directors Club, and six students hired before graduation. What's still being piloted and refined is CPA itself, the rubric and verification mechanism that makes that expert judgment assessable and scalable to other programs.

A Digital Product Design workflow where students act as art director, copywriter, and critical-thinking decision-maker across Stitch, Nano Banana, Gemini Notebook, Gemini, and Gemini Gems. Students work with AI from the start, across research, content development, wireframing, UI design, and rapid prototyping, iterating heavily while keeping humans in the loop at every decision point.

This is a creative workflow built with AI-assisted design, not an evaluation of AI output alone. CPA grades both the student's decision-making and their own direct contribution to the work — not just what they chose to keep, but what they made themselves: an original sketch, or the edits and finalizing that turned an AI draft into finished work. That direct contribution is what makes the fingerprint protectable as IP in the clearest sense — an actual artifact of authorship, not just a record of judgment.

That judgment is made verifiable and protectable as IP through critique. In every class, students discuss the what and the why of their work. Critique has been essential to design education for a century, so this is not a new event on the syllabus, it is a rubric applied to a ritual that already exists. Each critique is dated, so the explanation becomes a timestamped decision record, not just a live conversation that disappears afterward. That record is both the evidence CPA grades and the artifact that could defend authorship if it's ever challenged.

CPA is the rubric that grades that record.

This is not a hypothetical. The workflow and CPA rubric are a roadmap built by analyzing FIT's own award-winning AI-assisted student work: 21 awards at this year's Young Ones competition (8 in newly created AI categories), a Gold Cube from the Art Director's Club for AI-Process, and six AI-Assisted Design students hired before graduation. Those outcomes are the pilots. CPA reverse-engineers the pattern of human decisions — the art direction, the copywriting, the critical catches — that produced them, then codifies that pattern into a rubric and a verification mechanism other programs can adopt going forward.

This is the full answer to the challenge statement: the workflow (intervention) + the verification mechanism (timestamped presentations) + CPA (the grading rubric) + the scaling roadmap (Session 2).