Micro UX - Week 4

Brief: Design a way for a person to pass as a ‘generative AI’ in an everyday setting.

Methods: Synthesis, Rapid Prototyping, Crazy 4's

Team: Tanya Singh, Akriti Goel, Jakob Prufer, Ruoxi Song, Changlin Hou, myself

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The intentions and outcomes for this week were critical this week, as we had ambitious intentions for the mid-point review.

We were just turning the corner on finishing up the research, and shifting towards the more physical outcomes. With this in mind, we decided to divide and conquer the tasks we had set outselves. One team was to finish the research analysis and synthesis, while the other focussed on experimentation with materials and physical prototypes.

As part of the research team, we undertook the following:

• finishing the topic guide

• Full review and analysis of the surveys

• Full review of the directed storytelling

• Thematic analysis

This was crucial to review all the data together, as individually each method had been telling us one thing, but together they were weaving together a narrative.

Analysis of the survey data. Image by author.

The toolkit idea has come from our Crazy 4’s idea generation. We wanted to demonstrate that the research had lead us to ideas about the final outcome, so brainstorming quickly we each created four outcomes each, and spent time presenting them to one another.

Crazy 4's. Image by Changlin Hou.

This generated some fun ideas and some more dark and twisted, each with the potential to be explored. The toolkit offered more towards a human adapting their personalities and actions into becoming AI, which we felt strongly answered the brief and was scaleable, so we began pursuing this.

AI cheat sheet Image by author.

The prototyping team were undertaking some interesting experiments, playing with the idea of a toolkit for “how to become AI”. One of the things we had learned was peoples opinions and judgements on AI and its personality, with some recurring themes allowing us to create a check list of characteristics to embody, and one of our potential outcomes was a toolkit to enable the someone to become AI-like.

Testing humans treated as AI. Videos by Akriti Goel

Testing prototypes.. Images by Ruoxi Song, Akriti Goel and Changlin Hou

Finally, we pulled together the informatin we had gained from the synthesis and prototyping, and redefined our brief closer to what we intended to achieve:

Redefined brief. Image by author.

We had done a significant amount of work, and I think that we were noticeably over out allotted 7 minutes, however our enthusiasm for conveying the journey so far was evident.

The feedback was positive, the project partners enjoying some of the humour interweaved in our presentation. We received lots of helpful pointers and starting questions to help develop our next move. Across the team the mood was good, we felt successful and confident in our approach to date, and were looking forward to the upcoming weeks.