Teaching Designers with Story Telling
Design Project
Role
UX designer and researcher
What I did
Qualitative analysis, wireframing, design system creation, visual designing
Result
AI prototype that encourages more regulative thinking
Could Design Fictions Teach the next Generation of Designers?
While teaching an advanced-level design course at Utah State University (USU), Dr. Ha Nguyen (P.h.D.) noticed a problem with their students, and design education as a whole. There is a plethora of proven methods for educating novice designers, but a severe lack of guidance to taking designers from novices to experts. Dr. Nguyen's students could master basic design thinking, but struggled to practice more advanced design moves.
This is where Dr. Nguyen hypothesized design fictions could change design education as we know it.
Design fictions are akin to science fiction, they are born from the idea that story writing involves deep design thinking, especially science fiction stories. In science fiction, futuristic societies have integrated advanced technology into everyday life. Design fictions asks us to write about these futures but with a specificity that generates relevant ideas for our time.
The Task
To ease their students into writing design fictions, Dr. Nguyen charged me with designing a generative AI chatbot interface and trained GPT model to co-write with students.
Outcome:
Students integrate more advanced design concepts into their design processes.
Agency:
Students can reject everything the AI says.
Notes:
Giving users the ability to record their thoughts during the process will encourage more active engagement.
Research Takeaways
Previous Research
Luckily, we weren't starting from ground zero. Dr. Nguyen and I had just spent the last semester studying how designers interact with generative AI. In that research, we found:
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Artificial dialogue breaks the experience by reminding users they aren't talking to a real person.
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Generic responses are frustrating because they waste time.
01: Artificial Dialogue breaks the experience
02: Generic Responses are frustrating
Interviews
From user interviews with college students and professors, in addition to stakeholder interviews with Dr. Nguyen, I found the following:
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Students want control over the co-writing AI to integrate what they want and leave behind the rest.
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Instructors often only see generative AI as a cheating tool.
03: Students want to feel in control of AI
04: Instructors see AI as a cheating tool
"Cardboard" User Testing
I invited students to do a "cardboard" testing session by co-writing with ChatGPT.
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Starting design fictions was overwhelming for participants; they didn't know where to start.
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Completion was unclear, participants didn't know when they were done with the story.
05: Starting a design fiction was overwhelming
06: Completion was unclear
Wireframing Solutions
This is the first iteration of solutions I designed to solve the problems discovered during research.
01: Artificial Dialogue breaks the experience
02: Generic Responses are frustrating
To address the first two problems, users can easily omit anything the AI suggests as a co-writer. If the user does not like what the AI is writing, they could write the story entirely on their own taking inspiration from the AI suggestions.
03: Students want to feel in control of the AI
The feeling of control is deeply intertwined with choices. Having choices makes one feel they are in control. Likewise, Dr. Nguyen came up with the idea for the AI to generate three different story lines within the chat.
05: Starting a design fiction was overwhelming
To make the start of a design fiction clearer and give easier starting steps, users first generate the basic context of their story.
High-fidelity prototyping
​This iteration of Valuescribe allows users to view their library, generate story context, write a story with Valuescribe, view a presentation of their design values, and to reflect on the experience.
Informed Design Attributes
Branding
Essence: Creativity, books, innovation, playfulness, personality tests, and fun.
Fonts: Helvetica (designer’s font, creativity) and Libre Carlson Text (often used in books, books)
Colors: Dark with neon. Speaks to innovation and creativity.
Imagery: Painted and loose, encourage playfulness and fun, used in combination with neon colors to create an innovative but fun feel.
Measuring Success
The intended use case for ValueScribe is for students to independently engage with the program a few times across a semester. Each story they create would help students refine their design ideas, contributing to the final project.
Diary Study
This use case is perfectly aligned with Diary Studies. This design research method asks users to interact with a design at their leisure, and then record their thoughts and feelings in a provided diary. So, I created the following diary study for users to accomplish.
Wrap-up
What would I do differently next time?
Division of Labor
Integrating students further into this design project would have been valuable. Given this is a project for designers, a community-led design approach could have been fruitful.
As this project is a snapshot of research with Dr. Nguyen of USU, a division of labor is provided.
Jake
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Case studies & correlated visuals
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Chatbot design
Dr. Nguyen
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Original idea
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Research direction (grant application, owner of idea, etc.)
Collaborative
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Conduction of interviews
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Coding (qualitative analysis)