The toolkit

The toolkit helps designers and innovators, who play a role in the development of digital products and services, to...

1. see opportunities to harness AI for user, business and social value;

2. apply the design thinking method to AI concepts;

3. align user needs and watch over human values within algorithmic systems;

4. communicate and collaborate with data scientists and machine learning engineers.

You can use the toolkit from start to finish, or pick a few exercises, for example, you already have an AI concept in mind. A mix-and-match toolkit according to your needs and wishes.

Parts of the toolkit

The toolkit consists of several exercises, templates and card sets that assist designers and innovators in the different phases of a design thinking process (empathising, defining, generating ideas, prototyping and testing), namely…

1. Intro: a guide to using the toolkit with a crash course on AI and machine learning;

2. Generating ideas: a guide to think of user-centred solutions to challenges, a guide to identifying technology-driven and data-driven opportunities, and an 'AI prompt card deck for ideation' to gain insight into the opportunities of AI, but also the limitations of AI. The card deck always starts from the question 'What if ... for example, your user can interact with voice, you can respond to users' body, hand and face movements? In this way, you can determine what added value AI can have for your product or service or for your organisation. The card set was further adapted and renamed to ‘AI Ideation Cards’, this card set can also be downloaded separately on this page for 5€ (print version costs 40€).

3. Idea selection and concept development: a matrix to map the found ideas on the basis of desirability, feasibility, responsibility and viability, a template to sharpen your value proposition, a flowchart to quickly assess whether your idea is feasible and/or performable, a methodology (brainstorm and flowchart) to think about a task in a computational way.

4. Prototyping and testing: a guide on how to talk to users and test your value proposition and integrate the user perspective into your AI concepts and a guide to developing a prototype of your design and testing it with a group of users.

5. Designing and implementing: a guide to identifying possible failures of the product or service to look at what needs to be optimised to be successful, an exercise to map user needs to machine learning models, a metric to evaluate the accuracy of the model, an overview of nine key challenges in designing intelligent, adaptive and (semi-)autonomous systems, an exercise to identify extremes and polarities during design and where on the spectrum your product or service should lie, a template to map the consequences of your product or service.

6. Outro: a list of additional resources that direct you to more information on AI and machine learning, and to design tools and games that focus on this topic.

The toolkit contains all the necessary material (templates, map set) to carry out the different steps of this design thinking process. All you have to do is download the toolkit and start working with your design team right away.

The workshop

The toolkit manual does not specify how much time it will take to go through these steps. The steps follow a design thinking process, a process that you automatically go through while designing a product or service. This toolkit can therefore be seen as part of the design process, and not as an extra step on top of the other steps or tasks. The toolkit is also built as a mix-and-match package, so you don't have to go through all the steps if they don't seem useful to you. We recommend you take a closer look at the toolkit and determine which steps might be valuable for your product or service and go through these exercises.

Conclusion

The toolkit helps designers and innovators to put the user at the centre of AI and machine learning development. The toolkit follows the steps of the well-known design thinking process, but contains all kinds of helpful templates and card sets to make the steps in the design thinking process more concrete. Take the templates and card sets with you during the design phase, they will give you something to hold on to during the design process. Good luck!

The toolkit ‘AI meets Design’ can be downloaded here.

The card set ‘AI Ideation Cards’ can be downloaded here (for 5€, print version costs 40€).

This tool was not developed by the Knowledge Centre Data & Society. We describe the tool on our website because it can help you deal with ethical, legal or social aspects of AI applications. The Knowledge Centre is not responsible for the quality of the tool.