🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
This week from Investigation & Connection: Design of AI Products and Services, creative consultancy with Gilly Johnson, and bringing transparency to AI platforms with Shan Wang!
👋 Announcements — Come lunch and learn with us!
Welcome back to another Investigation & Connection issue! This week, UXA is hosting a Lunch and Learn event during the XHacks weekend on Saturday, 03/25 from 12-12:50pm, where you will have the chance to chat with professor & practitioners while having lunch and listening to their stories and advice! This opportunity is open to everyone and you can sign up via this RSVP form!
🐒 Campus Compass — Design of AI Products and Services
Designers have expertise in envisioning new things💭 that people might want or need. When designers consider using AI as a design material, they often think of it like magic, and they envision things that cannot be made. Design of AI Products and Services strives to teach students how to design new products and services that leverage the capabilities of AI and machine learning to improve the quality of peoples lives🤩
🔍 05-317 Design of AI Products and Services
🤔 What is Design of AI Products and Services?
Design of AI Products and Services focuses on making students more effective at having a conversation with AI and more effective at working with it as a design material in order to envision and give form to new AI enhanced products and services.
🧐 What do you do in Design of AI Products and Services?
Students will learn to follow matchmaking design (a new innovation process), user-centered design, and service design processes. Additionally, students will learn to ideate and reframe problematic situations by envisioning many possible products and services. Students will iteratively refine and assess their ideas with real users/customers, and class projects will focus on the challenges of deploying systems that generate errors.
😯 Who should take Design of AI Products and Services?
There are no specific prerequisites for this course.
🤩 Field Trip — UX in Creative Agencies with Gilly Johnson
What other UX industry options are there beyond in-house UX teams at companies we all know like Google or Meta? This week, we talked to Gilly Johnson, a Senior UX Designer at AKQA to learn what UX looks like at a creative agency. Agency work poses unique challenges and rewarding experiences, as well as a new opportunities. Join us as we explore them all!
“You’re thinking about where that person is, what they’re thinking, what issues have they experienced in the past that might impact how they think or operate in the future. You aren’t just designing large physical immersive experiences or screens in an app, you’re designing for people.”
— Gilly Johnson
🤩 Field Trip — Bringing transparency to AI platforms with Shan Wang
The rapid rise of AI raises a lot of questions regarding the role of both humans and AI in the ecosystem of AI powered tools. What new and emerging roles do designers play in this rapidly evolving field? Learn more about how Shan designs large scale AI platforms, and what factors are considered in the process.
“Transparency and interpretability is very fundamental to designing for AI, and we want to help users understand how models from a high level work.”
— Shan Wang
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this work are Sophie McGrady, Caleb Sun, Arin Pantja, and Rebecca Jiang.
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