The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Design Thinking practice: Insights from the Ecosystem of Startups

Abstract

Design Thinking (DT) is spreading out in the managerial community as an alternative way to innovate products and services respect to the classical stage-gate model mostly linked to technology-push innovative patterns. At the same time few disruptive technologies -like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning -are impacting the ways companies manage their knowledge and activate innovation and design processes. What is the impact that AI is exerting on DT practices? What are the main changes that DT is undergoing? These questions are analyzed in this paper, where the aim consists in increasing the understanding of the transformation that is occurring in DT and more general in innovation practices. Through a qualitative case study analysis made on startups offering AI based solutions supporting multiple or individual DT phases, the article pinpoints few main changes: i) a facilitation in blending the right mix of cultures and creative attitudes in innovation teams; ii) the empowerment of the research phase where statistical significance is gained and user analysis are less observer-biased; iii) the automatization of the prototyping and learning phases.

Sustainable Curriculum Planning for Artificial Intelligence Education: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective

“…(3) Process and praxis design: this stage is to design learning activities that encourage student development by addressing students' needs and interests, and alleviating AI fear through the design of socially meaningful group-based projects. To construct student-centered learning environments, we recommend that teachers should approach the subject area of AI from a design-thinking perspective with positive thinking that gains an empathic understanding of the people to design solutions of the problems [17,33]. This approach supports different types of students to better understand the complex world of AI by ensuring the participation of more students [34].…”

Digital Facilitation Assistance for Collaborative, Creative Design Processes

“…In their article, Zhu et al [15] revealed that the research phase could be accelerated by including artificial intelligence (AI), e.g. in the form of a digital assistant (DA), which led to shortening of the time dedicated for this activity [21]. While AI in the form of DAs can take over different roles in collaboration (e.g.…”

Artificial intelligence in UX/UI design: a survey on current adoption and [future] practices

“…Despite anecdotes regarding AI threats to design disciplines (Girling, 2016(Girling, , 2017, research on AIbased design is gaining ground. It has already covered topics such as AI's impact on design practices (Cautela et al, 2019;Liao et al, 2020;Verganti et al, 2020) and practitioners' roles in interacting with AI (Angell, 2019;Liu & Nah, 2019). While investigating these complex issues, scholars listened to design practitioners (Main & Grierson, 2020;Pfeiffer, 2018) such as UX designers (Churchill et al, 2018;Dove et al, 2017).…”

“…In a so-called 'AI design' context, solutions are delivered through intelligent systems during the design process. Notwithstanding, current approaches are restricted to employment of generative algorithms to support the creative process (L. or apply algorithms to automatise design tasks that used to require intense manipulation (Cautela et al, 2019). Since humans still mediate these processes, AI-empowered design (Verganti et al, 2020) might better describe the contemporary use of AI in the design area.…”

“…Research on AI in design practices has taken different directions. Cautela et al (2019) pointed out that AI can facilitate teamwork, empower research development, and automatise test and feedback phases. They expect AI algorithms to fit intelligent data processing activities, including image and language processing, virtual assistance, and recommendations for solutions.…”