Overview

Throughout the course, each project team works on a design challenge chosen at the beginning of the term, and designs a solution to solve the selected real-world problem. The final product is a high-fidelity prototype, and no implementation (i.e., programming) is involved. During the term, students design the final product through a series of phases including empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. More information about the deliverables can be viewed on the information page.

Project Theme

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially around Large Language Models (LLM), significantly impacts how we work, live, and dream. On the surface, AI seems to replace human with machines in various kinds of tasks. Actually, AI is revolutionizing the way people create, consume, and interact with digital content, and redefines the boundaries of human creativity. This instead calls for more deliberated design of AI systems that require closer and more harmonic human-AI interaction.

Overall, each team project needs to:

• Identify a real-world problem in a specific use case (e.g., art therapy, data exploration, social connection) — Be bold!
• Choose an AIGC technique (e.g., text, code, or image generation) that can be leveraged to solve the problem — Be wild!
• Design a novel mobile system that allows for effective and intuitive interaction with the AIGC technique to complete user tasks — Be creative!

We will use the People + AI Guidelines Principles and Patterns to help guide and assess your course project! Pick one of the following AI Development Principle that you want to emphasize in your project:

• User Autonomy: Design for the appropriate level of user autonomy (e.g., you might emphasize how your creative writing application gives user autonomy over final versions and the ability to ignore AI suggestions).
• Evolving Safety: Treat safety as an evolving endeavor (e.g., you might emphasize how you provide visible guardrails for participants or help them manage potentially toxic and harmful AI responses).
• Adapt with Feedback: Adapt AI with User Feedback (e.g., you might emphasize how your application solicits and use feedback from people to update how the AI system behaves).
• Helpful AI: Create helpful AI that enhances work and play (e.g., you might want to emphasize how your creative design applications can enhance user delight and serendipity in the art process).

These are some examples of how Google applied principles of AI design to different contexts. You may also draw inspiration and ideas from Microsoft’s Human-AI Experiences examples.