AI, Design & Co-Creation

AI is increasingly becoming a technology of interest for design– whether it be communication, fashion, graphic, interaction, interior, product and/or service design. There is a growing call for research that investigates the following topics: 

The use of AI within design processes & practices  

AI is changing the design landscape raising questions regarding how designers may use AI tools as part of their design processes and what skills and resources are needed for designers to leverage AI within their practice. How can Designers partner with AIs to create content? How can they embed AI in the things they produce? How will the use of AI tools within design impact design studios’ workplace cultures and the overall market demand for designers? 

The codesign of AI technologies  

AI driven technologies seem likely to be used within every aspect of our societies and world. This raises the possibility, indeed necessity, of exploring how AI technologies may be co-designed with and used by citizens, communities and organisations to unlock opportunities and meet their respective ambitions and aspirations. There is also a growing interest in how such codesign processes may embed values (e.g. social justice) within the design of AI technologies. In addition, there is an interest in how citizens, communities and organisations may use different AI technologies to shape the context, environment, world and wider society they are situated in.  This includes codesigning resources with stakeholders and users to support the inclusive and responsible use of AI.  

The future of AI within our societies and world  

It is clear that AI will have massive effects on the future. Here, there is an interest in using design as a means to explore how multiple and differing futures might play out as AI’s potential is further developed and explored. Speculative design and Design Fictions may provide a useful way to critically explore such futures. 

We encourage research that draws on Critical design, Feminist design, More-than-human design, Participatory design and Speculative design, as well as Research through Design and/or ethnographic, creative and participatory research approaches.  

Experts 

• Dr Reem Talhouk 
• Professor Jayne Wallace 
• Professor Bill Gaver 

Related Projects at Northumbria 

• Centre for Digital Citizens

Suggested Literature

• Mark Blythe. 2023. Artificial Design Fiction: Using AI as a Material for Pastiche Scenarios. In Proceedings of the 26th International Academic Mindtrek Conference (Mindtrek '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 195–206.  
• Delgado, F., Barocas, S., & Levy, K. (2022). An uncommon task: Participatory design in legal AI. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW1), 1-23. 
• Yang, Q., Steinfeld, A., Rosé, C., & Zimmerman, J. (2020, April). Re-examining whether, why, and how human-AI interaction is uniquely difficult to design. In Proceedings of the 2020 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13). 
• Delgado, F., Yang, S., Madaio, M., & Yang, Q. (2023, October). The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (pp. 1-23). 
• Srinivasan, R., & Uchino, K. (2021, March). Biases in generative art: A causal look from the lens of art history. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 41-51). 
• Ashby, S., Hanna, J., De Rooij, A., Kasprzak, M., Hoekstra, J., & Bos, S. (2023, June). Articulating (Uncertain) AI Futures of Artistic Practice: A Speculative Design and Manifesto Sprint Approach. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (pp. 312-318).
• Simeone, L., Mantelli, R., and Adamo, A. (2022) Pushing divergence and promoting convergence in a speculative design process: Considerations on the role of AI as a co-creation partner, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. 
• Forlano, L. E., & Halpern, M. K. (2023). Speculative histories, just futures: From counterfactual artifacts to counterfactual actions. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 30(2), 1-37.
• Wong, R. Y., Khovanskaya, V., Fox, S. E., Merrill, N., & Sengers, P. (2020, April). Infrastructural speculations: Tactics for designing and interrogating lifeworlds. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-15).

*if you are struggling to access any of the suggested literature, then please contact ccai.cdt@northumbria.ac.uk

Related Peak of Research Excellence  

• Cultural and Creative Industries 
• Computerised Society & Digital Citizens