It AIn’t Nuttin’ New – Interaction Design Practice After the AI Hype

Abstract

The year 2018 was the moment of increasing awareness of artificial intelligence (AI) in every imaginable domain. This article examines the question have AI technologies and their related hype already affects interaction design practice in the Western industry. It looks at the potential impact in tools, processes and products of interaction design. It highlights three potentially significant themes which stand out of the hype: 1) AI utilization as a technology push 2) generative AI, and 3) the ethics of AI. Each theme is analyzed to derive the claim that for now, AI has little specific impact on interaction design. On a closer observation, generative AI is one the themes that promises the biggest change in the longer run but is simultaneously an elusive hope, which may never lead to anything but AI-augmented creativity support tools, some of which already exist. The article describes the AI hype is partially positive, partially problematic for the advancement of design goals. The hype contributes positively by helping to surface healthy ethical debates that give more credence to designers’ long-term attempts to be user-centered and ethical. This ethical discussion tends to neglect the fact that the ethical burden bestowed upon algorithms is not a new one but was going on long before the big data fuzz. It is evidently now more critical than ever. This articles’ intention is to inform the academic researchers working on human-computer interaction and interaction design about the need to continue developing human-centered AI for both general audiences and specifically for interaction designers. There are already promising examples of HCI research that show potential to affect design practice. Common to all is that they do not attempt to roll out a full generative AI solution but rather support human designers in iterative and somewhat well-constrained tasks. Overall it seems that by 2020, interaction designers will be increasingly working on technology that involves AI elements, but those elements itself will not yet be core of how their work is carried out. Awareness of the ethical challenges and technical affordances related to AI technology and its utilization will become more important than the integration of AI into the interaction design process in the short term. By the end of 2020’s, we maybe yet looking into a very different reality from now.