Making AI Understandable by Making it Tangible: Exploring the Design Space with Ten Concept Cards

Abstract

The embodiment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in everyday use products is raising challenges and opportunities for HCI and design research, such as human understandings of AI’s functions and states, passing back and forth of control, ethics, transparency and user experience. To respond to these challenges, HCI and design researchers have been working on research areas such as Explainable AI (XAI); Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT); Human-Centered AI, as well as guidelines for Human-AI interaction design. Consequently, the interest in studying interaction modalities and their contributions to understandable and transparent AI has been growing. However, the tangible and embodied modality of interaction and more broadly studies of the forms of such everyday use products are relatively under-explored. This paper builds upon a larger project on designing graspable AI and it introduces a series of concept cards that aim to aid design researchers’ creative and critical exploration of tangible and understandable AI space. We conducted a user study in two parts of online sessions and semi-structured interviews and found out that to envision physicality and tangible interaction with AI felt challenging and “too abstract”. Even so, the act of creative exploration of that space not only supported the participants to gain new design perspectives, but also supported them to go beyond anthropomorphic forms of AI.