Digital design for gen-ai
Purpose
Full cycle group design project for Stanford course CS 247A beginning with Stage 2 Needfinding. Developed grounded theory of problem space after synthesizing interviews from eight new graduate students about their current food habits and usage of AI and then created a product concept. Generally, our project thinks about how to reimagine the tasks we find dull or annoying but have to do anyways - like grocery shopping, cooking, doing dishes, taxes with generative AI.
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Skills Developed: Needfinding, User Interviewing, User Research, Rapid Experimentation and Prototyping
design concept
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​Based off the question of "How might we make mundane tasks like grocery shopping feel like less of a chore and more of an adventure for first-year grad students?"
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AR experience bringing visual synesthesia storytelling to grocery shopping
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Conceived from full user research, data synthesis + insights, brainstorm, rapid experimentation, ethical review, concept down-selection process
design narrative
Our group of four started with only three requirements - we picked an audience (new graduate students), a domain (food), and we knew we needed to incorporate generative AI.
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From here, we conducted eight interviews (two each) and transcribed the data into a Miro board. We then took the data and created buckets of similar themes we noticed across people.
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Miro Board - each interview coded in a different color
This synthesis led to a grounded theory for the rest of our project:
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Grounded Theory
We wrote 20+ How Might We questions aimed at addressing this theory and others we drew from the data, and then moved into solutions brainstorming answering these HMWs. Our group used a Miro board for this, and used bodystorming as a tactic to build energy and ideas. We heatmap voted on which ones we liked the best to down-select to three concepts to take into rapid experimentation.
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Brainstorming and Heatmap Voting
For each concept, we wrote an experiment plan aimed at testing one basic and fundamental aspect of each design. For the grocery shopping experiment, we recruited three participants for a study asking if storytelling even made grocery shopping more fun - luckily, it did!
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Post-Experiment Summary Slide
The final deliverable for this project was aimed at understanding and predicting design futures for this concept. Our design fiction uses humor and low-budget video production as a vehicle for understanding the joyful intent of the project experience but also perhaps unintended downsides to the product.
We also created an ethical review document to capture ethical risks and mitigation strategies to build into development in the imagined case that this product make it to market and widespread adoption.
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