AI meets Design 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, if you already have an AI concept in mind. A mix-and-match toolkit according to your needs and wishes.

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’.
3. Idea selection and concept development: a matrix to map the found ideas based on 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 challengesin designing intelligent, adaptive and (semi-)autonomous systems, an exerciseto 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 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.

The AI meets Design toolkit was developed by Nadia Piet in collaboration with MOBGEN | Accenture Interactive Amsterdam. Nadia Piet is the founder of AIxDesign, an independent community that focuses on the intersection of design and AI, machine learning and data. The community believes AI is for everyone and therefore focuses on user experience, accessibility and design (thinking).

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

Download the toolkit from the AIxDesign website. The link below will take you to this external website.