Interaction 19, held from 3-8 February in Seattle, is a week of design events for interaction designers from around the world. It assemble a diverse group of professionals and academics to explore the edges of interaction design and help to spark a transformation of the discipline for the needs of the 21st century. This year’s event features: Interaction 19 Conference, Education Summit, Local Leaders Retreat, Workshops, Student Design Charette and Interaction Awards Ceremony.
The three-day conference Interaction 19 is the main event. In the process of watching speeches of various topics, I found myself interested in the content about artificial intelligence. On 7 February, there are two groups of lectures about AI: “AI is the New UI” and “AI in the Wild”. The first topic attracts me very much. “AI is the New UI” includes five presentation: “Designing for AI”, “How to Design With, Not For, Artificial Intelligence”, “Democratization, Industrialization and Augmentation: Where Creativity and Design Craft is Going Next”, “Designing Transparent AI” and “How AI Will Change The Way We Work”.
In “Designing for AI”, Emily Sappington talked about her opinions about imbuing artificial intelligent components in products. She shared her practices both in large companies and startups, indicating that creating minimum viable intelligence for AI product is the most important and fundamental strategy of product design. Meanwhile, designers should set appropriate user expectation for AI interaction process considering the user’s satisfaction. Because user’s interaction with product is a trust-building process in which quality and ability delivered in product that company promised directly influence the consequence of user testing. Take voice assistance as an example, “A user who can’t set a reminder with their voice , will not be likely to trust the same voice assistant to take down credit card information and order pizza.”
In “How to Design With, Not For, Artificial Intelligence”, Joe Meersman began with IBM Wason case study and some best practices. Then he proposed concrete framework of successful AI delivery, including ideal delivery team for each of the three categories of AI projects and relative delivery process.
Similarly, “Designing Transparent AI” from Arathi Sethumadhavan and Dr. Samuel J. Levulis also suggested that designers should set appropriate expectations about what the AI can and cannot do and strive to make various elements of system performance transparent to users. Then they provided some examples of the techniques that can be adopted to make AI algorithms and vulnerabilities more transparent to users.
In “Democratization, Industrialization and Augmentation: Where Creativity and Design Craft is Going Next”, Andreas Markdalen proposed three things he believes that are critical to understand where design craft and discipline is going. The barriers for entering design field is diminish and people around the world are starting to participate and contribute. Design literacy is wildly increased and process commoditization is widely used with the emergence of new design tools and platforms, such as Autodraw, Adobe Sensei and Simple.io which are achieved by artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. Meanwhile, the popularity of digital transformation promotes the industrialization of digital design. Systemic design helps brand save time and effort in delivering value and product to market. Seamless workflow allows team to drive efficiency and automation. Open source tools like Airbnb design and generative design in Sketch are starting blend generative design with experience design. As a result, technology helps augment human skill and creativity to a large extent. As designers are starting to co-create alongside AI-driven systems and engines, a new era of systems and product design begins.
Kristian Samarian’s speech “How AI Will Change The Way We Work” also looks forward to the future. He indicated AI will likely cause a more significant shift for designers than previous design shift. Specifically, AI will bring us into an era of “teaching” technology. As more work is automated, our design domain will change to augmented human intelligence and human-machine collaboration.
“AI is the New UI” shows that AI is bringing a wide range of changes to the design field. Firstly，AI contributes to efficiency economy, improving the design efficiency. More and more automated design tools have emerged, replacing the repetitive and inefficient design work. As Markdalen mentioned in his speech, Airbnb Design can convert hand draft into prototype in a real time. There has also emerged automatically design tool like “Luban”from Alibaba. “Luban” makes use of deep learning and image generation technology to automatically design and generate advertising banners for Taobao, so that the design of advertising can also achieve personalized recommendation. On “Double 11” shopping festival of 2016, Luban made its debut. On “Double 11” 2017, Luban had been able to produce 40 million posters a day, an average of 8,000 posters per second, and each poster was designed according to the characteristics of commodity images. In other words, each one is unique.
More importantly, AI will interconnect all things, thus the design object will shift from single computer or mobile platform to intelligent devices, such as smart voice box, smart TV, smart cars, etc., forming a multi-scene fusion linkage. Meanwhile, the trend of combination between software and hardware means design objects are more diverse and design reference dimensions are more abundant. “AI is the new UI” indicates the trend of wild application of AI as the form as UI and UX, not just screens on devices. According to a report from Accenture in 2017, AI is rising as the new purveyor of UI and UX. The leading enterprise technology vendors have also regarded AI as the future of computer interfaces. More screenless computing is on the horizon with the innovation of AI in the field of interaction (McKendrick, 2017). Autonomous vehicles and voice-activated home assistants are just early examples of intelligent hardware, now more intelligent hardware is booming in business scenarios. Alipay’s face recognition payment is the representative of AI’s landing in new retail field. It is a new payment method based on artificial intelligence, biometrics, 3D sensing and big data risk management technology. Users can make payment by scaning their faces without using mobile phones, which effectively improves the user’s consumption experience and the efficiency of the payment. On September 1, 2017, Alipay landed the first face payment machine at the KFC restaurant in Hangzhou. By December 2018, there are 23 stores in 11 cities have tried. Not only in KFC, but also in retail scenes such as supermarkets and pharmacies, hundreds of cities across the country have begun to try face payment.
The rapid development of information technology brings great chance and threat to all walks of life. Every industry is exploring more possibilities and thinking about how to take advantage of AI. The design industry needs creativity and emotion, which should play a more important role in linking AI and humanity in the era of intelligence. Therefore, the relationship between design and AI is far more profound and complex than the work replacement relationship. As Sengers argued in “Practices for a machine culture: a case study of integrating cultural theory and artificial intelligence”: “In order to be able to address contemporary human experience, we need science and the humanities to be combined into hybrid forms which can address the machinic and the human simultaneously.”
– Mingqi Rui, Info 601, Professor Chris Alen Sula
Reference:
Interaction 19. (2019). Interaction 19 – 3-8 February 2019 • Seattle, WA. [online] Available at: https://interaction19.ixda.org/program/7_thursday/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2019].
McKendrick, J. (2017). More artificial intelligence, fewer screens: the future of computing unfolds | ZDNet. [online] ZDNet. Available at: https://www.zdnet.com/article/artificial-intelligence-the-new-user-interface-and-experience/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2019].
Phoebe Sengers, “Practices for a Machine Culture: A Case Study of Integrating Cultural Theory and Artificial Intelligence” Surfaces VIII: 1999, 6.