Sixteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Along with the “infrastructural turn” over the past two decades, participatory design has become ubiquitous, integrated as part of the infrastructure for contemporary practice. User-participation is a widely recognized component of work—regularized as crowdsourcing, cognitive surplus, and augmentation of salaried employees—unpaid participants contribute ideas, support feedback, and generate innovation. Harnessing such labor is a job itself. Automated design becomes ever-more routine work of advanced organizations with the support of AI and related technologies. The argument specifically addresses emergent situations where feedback is limited, asserting that rhetoric remains foundational for understanding implications of ethical, cultural, and social dimensions of emergent praxis. While numerous schema utilize artificial intelligences, personae to represent user feedback, and modeling to stand in for users, the presentation interrogates the utility of virtual users, articulating levels of user input necessary to meaningfully label a process User-centered. This study analyzes how AI as infrastructure is impacting participatory design, and argues that the value of practice lies in their ability to solve complex problems while designing systems that facilitate new forms of participation and user-generated content. Our conclusion recognizes infrastructural developments alter user research, methods of data gathering, roles that users play, and attitudes towards users; novel AI design practices should be understood as developments of user-centered and user-participatory methods. That is, as infrastructure changes, design remains central. We argue that with the assistance of AI designers both “fit distinct pieces together into a stable whole” and “produce fleeting moments of alignment suited to particular tasks with materials ready-to-hand”.