The workshop introduces the challenges and opportunities that emerge in experience design when a product, service, or experience includes artificial intelligence components in either a structurative, agentive or evaluative role.
The structurative role of AI refers to those designs where the environment itself is a product of algorithmic interpretation, interpolation, or creation. For example, digital spaces such as Netflix or Facebook, but increasingly also adaptive software tools that we use for work-related tasks. This aspect primarily deals with the systemic role of AI as an environment-shaping agent and as a new design material.
The agentive role of AI refers to the way human-AI interactions are framed and shaped by the experience. For example, the way we can chat with ChatGPT, have to use Discord to have Midjourney dream up images for us, or speak clearly to get the Google Assistant to play our favourite playlist. This aspect deals specifically with product- and interface-level issues for AI-enhanced experiences using text, gestures, voice, or biometric information.
The evaluative role of AI refers to the role of artificial intelligence in large-scale processes where it provides human actors with information for subsequent action. For example, for the automatic resolution of legal cases, clinical diagnostic support, or autonomous driving. This aspect primarily deals with issues of cognitive and algorithmic bias, the building and maintaining of trust, and ways to prevent or fix the potential misalignment between human and software actors in a process.
The workshop introduces these three aspects of artificial intelligence as a pragmatic framework to be used to better understand the relationship between the algorithmic components and the design components of an experience in different scenarios, to better evaluate their impact on experience design practices and their consequences for users.
Workshop attendees will work their way through a concrete case study based on current industry issues and thus gain a grounding practical but theoretically sound understanding of how design processes are impacted by AI, of the issues and limitations that come with AI, and of what methods and techniques should be considered when designing human-centred AI-augmented experiences.
After the workshop, attendees will be able to:
– Describe the opportunities and challenges that artificial intelligence brings to user experience design
– Identify whether AI plays a structural, agentive, or evaluative role in an experience
– Demonstrate ability to critically identify which approaches, methods and techniques are relevant to frame and solve issues of human-AI interaction in AI-augmented experiences
– Demonstrate ability to apply user experience methods and techniques that impact on all aspects, structural, agentive, and evaluative, of how AI contributes to the experience
– Critically describe the contributions that user experience design and information architecture can bring to the design of human-centred experiences where artificial intelligence is a key component
