Co-creative AI for more effective co-design

Co-design – the active participation of stakeholders in design activities – is recognised as a good design practice. However, empowering these stakeholders to be regular creative participants in these activities remains difficult. Facilitated workshops are one established means of empowerment creative co-design work, but workshops are time-intensive and consume scarce resources. One more cost-effective alternative solution is to codify creative thinking practices and techniques in AI-powered tools – tools that become creative facilitators on each stakeholder’s mobile device. The ideation Suite is one such tool. Using an input design problem, it uses AI to generate candidate ideas, whilst giving control to the user to select directions, techniques and ideas. This talk will unpack the background to the Ideation Suite and demonstrate on service design problems.

About the speaker:

Neil Maiden is Professor of Digital Creativity at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London, and Director of the National Centre for Creativity enabled by AI funded by Research England. He researches uses of artificial intelligence to augment human creativity. His background in software engineering led him to explore where requirements come from, which led to his current focus on digital tools for creative thinking. He has been a principal and co-investigator on numerous EPSRC- and EU-funded research projects. His details are available at https://www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/neil-maiden.