Column: Conscious Experience Design

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere—a sea change affecting all aspects of life at a rate far faster and more far reaching than anything we’ve experienced thus far. AI promises intelligent companions and copilots that simplify and enrich our daily activities and social interactions at work, in our community, and in our domestic life. The vision is a more pervasive, omnipresent, and active fabric of intelligence that seamlessly wraps around and through all the spaces of people’s lives––ready to activate on command.

However, the path to this vision and its widespread adoption requires progressive design approaches to support its evolution over time. During the formative stages of this technology, UX designers must leverage their expertise to design new user interfaces that effectively leverage dynamic visual affordances and multisensory cues to better guide discoverability and cooperation with fully integrated AI intelligence. Over time, these explicit cues and indicators may recede as the adoption of seamless interactions takes hold. But until then, the practice of visually enhancing the access to and activation of intelligence is necessary. Read More

As artificial-intelligence (AI) technology advances, traditional user-experience methods must adapt to effectively address the dynamic and relational nature of new autonomous agents. The state of user interfaces has shifted dramatically from interactive systems with fixed, finite states to adaptive AI agents that are capable of flexible, even infinite interactions. Today’s AI-powered user interfaces don’t just respond to commands, they adapt, learn, and interact in ways that mimic human conversations and interactions.

As AI agents evolve to exhibit open-ended interactions, prototyping becomes crucial for UX designers to truly understand and effectively test these dynamic systems—going far beyond the requirements of traditional user-interface design. In this new era of the design of autonomous-agent experiences, UX designers need to more frequently and rapidly prototype throughout the design process and strengthen their skills in computational design to achieve optimal success. Read More

As UX designers, along with the rest of the world today, we’re hyperaware of the impact and momentum of generative artificial intelligence (AI)—so much so that we’re now wondering whether people might be focusing so much on a few trees that they’re forgetting to consider the forest. Allow me to explain. While AI is undeniably a sea change in computing, it ultimately represents a much broader revolution in which technology is becoming more human centric and human conscious. Essentially, technology is now learning to adapt to people, as opposed to people needing to learn and adapt to new technologies.

As part of this shift, technology is expanding not only its cognitive abilities but also its sensory, social, and ethical capabilities. Within the expansion of technology’s sensory abilities, we’re seeing advancements and growth in spatial computing. Spatial context and movement within three-dimensional spaces are core human-sensory abilities, and thus, likely new growth areas in humanizing machine interactions. Spatial computing has emerged as one of the most compelling paradigms that are melding with AI—so compelling that we can consider it the third wave of interactions in personal computing. Read More