CMU’s Dan Saffer Will Address AI & Design in 2023

 Workshop T2: New Techniques for Designing with AI
} Nov 2, 2023   1:00pm – 4:30pm

AI innovations have spread across most aspects of people’s lives. Spam filters block messages no one wants, ride-sharing services predict service demand and dynamically adjust pricing, entertainment and retail services recommend desired items and content, bots and robots automate tedious and dangerous work, and intelligent systems help forecast the future, from this week’s weather to the number of sweaters a company will sell to how bad traffic might be. Recent advances created new capabilities, such as systems that detect cancer better than doctors, AI players that beat grandmasters, driverless road and aerial vehicles, and content generation systems that open a world of possibility and raise red flags around ethics and unintended harm.

The success of AI makes it feel like this technology is ripe for innovation. However, today, almost 90% of AI initiatives fail. In addition, innovation teams often fail to recognize low-hanging fruit, situations where a little simple AI would add real customer value. Current technical innovation approaches don’t work well when applied to AI. The HCI research community has been working on how to improve the process from brainstorming to prototyping to delivery. This workshop takes some of what we’ve been teaching our students at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and adopts it for practitioners.

This workshop will be teaching a handful of new techniques that designers, product managers, and researchers can take back and start using immediately. The workshop will be short short lectures to introduce a technique, then get to exercises working with the method hands-on. We’ll start with Matchmaking: how to find the best uses of different AI technologies. Next, we’ll work on Adaptive UIs: how to find places in our existing products where we can insert AI for the most value for our users. We’ll do an exercise on Explaining AI: how can users trust what they’re seeing and what happens when AI guesses wrong. We’ll end with Consequence Scanning to identify risks (and attempt to overcome them).

 AI by Design
} Nov 3, 2023   4:00pm

Most AI projects fail. Some fail quietly before launch; some fail spectacularly publicly, becoming another media horror story about AI. Why does this happen? Because the current process for designing AI products and services is broken. But a new approach to designing AI is possible, one that instills more cooperation between designers, PMs, data scientists, and engineers.This talk walks through a new method that has been developed over many years at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. This method uses elements of user-centered design and technology capabilities to find situations where moderate technical performance, high value, and low risk combine to make successful AI projects.

 Speaker Bio: Dan Saffer

Dan Saffer is a designer, author, and educator, currently an Assistant Professor of the Practice at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches classes in service design, interaction design, and designing with AI.

Previously, he was the VP of Product at Mayfield Robotics, Creative Director of New Products at wearables and consumer electronics powerhouse Jawbone, Creative Director at Smart Design and Experience Design Director at renowned UX consultancy Adaptive Path.

Dan is also a respected thought leader in the field of experience and interaction design, as author of four acclaimed books including the recent Microinteractions: Designing with Details (2013) and the seminal Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices (2006). He also curates articles, books, presentations, and videos on design going back to the 1940s for The Interaction Design Library. His own articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wired, Fast Company, UX Magazine. On top of all that, he holds multiple design patents and is a frequent speaker at major design conferences worldwide. This is his second appearance at CanUX after previously keynoting the event in 2017.

Follow Dan on Twitter @odannyboy

Prior Presentations:

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING (TO SERVICES) (CanUX 2017)
Nov 4, 2017 4:40pm / 40 min

*Image credit: Dan Saffer