by daniil.ivanov -

Exposé

Working title

Meaningful application of high technology in design

1. the problem (Starting point, problem description)                                             

Which theoretical, practical, social, etc. problem is the starting point of your thesis?

What do you think is the real cause of the problem?

In the last few years, technology has made huge leaps and we are on the verge of a technological revolution comparable to the advent of the steam engine. This cannot but affect various fields of labor, and some professions may cease to exist in the next decade. Some fear that the design profession (in various iterations, from graphic designer to product designer) may be replaced by Artificial Intelligence. This is a topic of great interest to me, as I myself am studying towards Interaction Design and plan to continue my career as a UX Designer. That’s why I wanted to explore this topic.

2. state of research

What is the state of research on this problem? What findings are available? What has not yet been (sufficiently) addressed, clarified or contradicted? How does your own work relate to the existing research?

At this point, I wouldn’t say there are a lot of different studies regarding this topic. Many papers are appearing right now, as the topic became relevant just a couple of years ago. So I keep my finger on the pulse and check to see if new research is emerging.

3. the question

Which question(s) should be answered in your master thesis? What is the main question?

Consequences of AI on the traditional UX/UI design

4. the hypothesis resp. the objective                                               (max. ½ page)

What do you want to prove, disprove or design, programme, … in your Master’s thesis?

Target catalogue

I’d like to answer the question of how much the latest technology will affect the design field. I will probably consider two scenarios: utopian and dystopian.

5. the reference to theory

Which explanatory approaches or theories are referred to?

What is your point of view? What is your position?

I also want to look at previous cases of technological revolutions, how they occurred in a historical context, and what input they had on disappearing or highly changing fields of labor. I would also like to look at how AI works, what it can do, and what the potential outcome of its development might be.

6. the method

What is the methodological procedure (work steps, approach)? Which methods and instruments do you want to use in the project? What does a possible solution path or procedure methodology look like? How should the problem be solved, the question answered, how should the sources be analysed?

Speculative design, expert interviews

7. the material

What material and sources are available on the topic?

Which sources (data, videos, comparative material, …) are available, which need to be identified, collected?

There are many interviews with famous visionaries (Ilon Musk, Bill Gates and others) about AI and its possible impact on the industry, many designers share their opinions and experiences on various portals, there are already some statistics on layoffs from large companies. All this is to be collected and analyzed for relevance. I also want to do some interviews with experts and process them.

8. (preliminary) bibliography in compliance with the rules of citation

I can’t give a preliminary list of references yet, as the topic is quite specific and evolving dynamically

9. (preliminary) structre

Which aspects should be dealt with and in which order?

I would definitely like to include a historical overview, the nature of AI, how it works and what it can do, expert interviews and 2 scenarios at the end, a utopian and a dystopian.

10. the timetable (project phases and duration)

How much time is needed for the most important work steps (research, data collection, data evaluation, creation of the work piece, writing the raw text, revision, layout, final correction)? – Milestones

When should the work be finished?

During spring I would like to collect all the theoretical material, in summer I am going to process it and conduct expert interviews. By the end of August I would like to finish it.

by helena.opower -

Impulse #8 Article about potential harms & benefits of social media for children & teenagers

As the start of my Master’s thesis is now getting closer and closer, I am now looking more closely at existing literature and studies in this area. I came across a very interesting paper that covers many of the areas relevant to my research. It also refers to many studies that support the statements and I intend to make a note of these for a more detailed analysis in the psychological field. This paper is therefore a good starting point and an overview of important points that need to be considered and examined in more detail.

It is about the growing challenges in the area of children’s and young people’s mental health. It emphasizes that the use of social media and online platforms could play a potential role in these problems. The paper emphasizes the long-term effects of children’s interactions with social media on mental and physical health. I think the parts that deal with neuroscientific principles, the behavior of children and adolescents in social media and the effects this has on brain development are particularly exciting. Various areas and features of social media are highlighted here and how they affect a teenager’s brain. This is definitely a very exciting point and my plan is to delve more into studies in this area so that I can use this data as the basis for my master’s thesis.

Testimony

APA article

by nadja.pirchheim -

IMPULSE #7_Interview Mediasquad

Today I had the opportunity to have a nice chat with Mrs. Frank from the company Mediasquad in Innsbruck. The company is specialized in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality and they created the application “Berufe-VR” for the chamber of commerce.

Mrs. Frank gave me some insights about the implementation of the application and other useful tipps I need to consider when creating my VR project for my masterthesis. She also told me about their process when starting a new project and what to consider with working with clients. Furthermore she empathized how important it is to have feedback for the user especially when there is no haptic involvement e.g. handtracking, gaze control, etc. Another important hint was the iterative process and always including user testing throughout the project. Also to test the application on users which are not experts in the field – rather use rookies to get helpful criticism.

In conclusion the conversation with Mrs. Frank was very valuable and I am thankful for the opportunity to gain insights and expertise from people in the field.

Links:

https://www.berufe-vr.at

VR Projekte
by daniil.ivanov -

Impulse #6 – Creating rules for a LARP game using ChatGPT.

I’m in the field of creating and organizing LARP games as my Hobby and I decided to try using AI to help me in this activity. My task was to write a list of rules, regulations for a game event, namely for a conference that took place within the game. These rules were to include a rather lengthy list of rules and prohibitions, but had enough loopholes that players could use them in the game format if they wanted to. It would have been a challenge to create such a large amount of text on my own, so I decided to take advantage of new technologies and involved ChatGPT in this task.

At first things did not go smoothly, the neural network did not fully understand the task and the specifics of the RPG setting, so it did not give me the results I wanted, but later, when ChatGPT got a sufficient amount of context, it gave me roughly the results I wanted. I discussed some points with the AI separately, asked to change nuances and in the end I was happy with the result.

After I showed the result to my team, they were impressed that I had created this with AI, but they still had questions about the rules, so I took the second round and came to ChatGPT to work on some parts. Since the neural network was already aware of the whole context, it was not very difficult to correct mistakes, I find the memorization functionality within one dialog box very handy.

In the end, I posted these rules for the players and they were more than happy with the result of the work I had done.

by daniil.ivanov -

Impulse #5 – Klanglicht

In October our group took part in the city festival “Klanglicht”. At this festival, new technologies were used to immerse visitors in a special atmosphere, to awaken feelings and emotions, to make them think.

I like the concept of the festival as a whole, Graz for a few days becomes a huge exhibition platform where artists can realize their most daring ideas and citizens and guests of the city can touch something beautiful and interesting without any special efforts.

It was very interesting for me to look at the organization of the process from the inside, to find out what technologies can be used, what places and locations are involved and so on.

by daniil.ivanov -

Impulse #4 – Article “Revolutionizing Education with AI: Exploring the Transformative Potential of ChatGPT”

Below you can read an analysis of the article I read according to the SQ3R method.

Survey.

I found the structure of the article simple and clear. It is divided into several parts, namely: Introduction, AI and AI in Education. The titles of the main parts and sub-chapters are conveniently highlighted in colors, so it doesn’t take much effort to do a brief overview.

Questions.

  1. How exactly can chatbots be used in education?
  2. How can they be implemented into the learning process in schools as part of UX design?
  3. The ethical side of the issue.
  4. How might the introduction of AI affect classical educational methods?

Read.

The article briefly reviews the history of the emergence of AI as well as its development, which is undoubtedly important for a general understanding of the issue. Separate subchapters are devoted to chat bots in general and Chat-GPT in particular.  Then there is a chapter devoted to a specific topic, namely AI in learning. Both pros and cons of the approach are discussed in detail, and the ethical side of the issue is also not left without attention, and a separate subchapter is devoted to it. Of course, at the end there is a brief conclusion that summarizes the results.

I would say that the article did not disappoint me at all, I got my questions answered and was satisfied with what I read. A few new insights have definitely emerged in my mind and I hope to be able to use the new to me information in writing my Master thesis.

Recite.

  • Chatbots can be used to personalize the learning process for each student as much as possible, not to mention that, unlike a teacher, a chatbot is always ready to answer any question at any time of the day or night.
  • The chatbot should behave as much like a real person as possible, the interface should not be very different from a normal chat with a teacher, so for the student such an introduction will be smooth.
  • There are some concerns that the article provides:
    • reliability and accuracy of the information it presents
    • potential biases in the data, resulting in discriminatory or misleading responses
    • privacy issues since it may collect and store personal information about students
    • questions about the role of teachers and the impact on the job market for educators
    • lack of human interaction, reducing the quality of the educational experience for students
    • over-reliance and dependency on technology
    • concerns about the rights of intellectual property
    • transparency and accountability as it might be difficult to identify how decisions are being made by the chatbot
  • The article says chatbots can make learning a lot easier for teachers and administrators, but they can never replace a real person.

Review.

Revisiting the article and my analysis above I can confidently say that I found the article very helpful. It expands my knowledge in AI and provides certain insights that will be useful to me when writing my paper. At first glance, it may seem that the topic is not that relevant to the topic of my Master thesis, however, the use of chatbots, specifically Chat GPT in training, is a great example of smart use of high technology and from the UX point of view it is also exciting to consider. What implementation methods are already in place, what can be improved, how to deal with ethical issues – all of this is relevant to any field where new technologies such as AI are or will be used.

by helena.opower -

Discussions about my Master Thesis

This week I had a few more discussions about my approach to the Master’s thesis. I was able to take away some valuable points that I hadn’t really considered before. One important point is data protection. I will be working with children and teenagers and in this respect I have to pay attention to guidelines and, above all, parental consent. To do this, I need to carry out detailed research in advance, contact people who are familiar with this if necessary and ensure that I protect myself adequately. Another point, more related to the content, is literature research. There is still a lot that can be done here and existing data can be extracted. As my project is very extensive, this is definitely a valuable point, as I can save myself time by referring to existing studies and literature. In addition, it can be helpful to include the EU directives regarding the protection of minors and use these as a framework. Another point to consider is a gradual structure of the Instagram Youth version. This would mean that features would be activated for each age group and the platform would be adapted to the respective age group. This would mean that teenagers would not be thrown into the deep end of the “real” Instagram version when they reach the age of majority, but would be gradually guided there and introduced to age-appropriate features. With regard to my own studies, I was advised to distribute the questionnaires widely in order to obtain quantitative data. For qualitative data, I could consider a preliminary study with, for example, 5 teenagers to roughly define the project design and then ask targeted questions to the general public. Assuming that the app is divided into age groups, it would also be important to survey teenagers of different ages and see where there are differences between the age groups. This could serve as a good basis for defining the activation of various features.

All in all, I can say that the discussions only motivated me even more for my topic. I was also reminded that I have a lot planned and that it is important to have a well-thought-out schedule. I will draw this up over the next few weeks so that I can get straight to work at the official start of my Master’s thesis. It’s nice for me to see that my topic is also well received by the outside world, that the problem and my goal are immediately understood and that everyone is looking forward to the result. This confirms that I have chosen an important topic that relates to current social problems.

by daniil.ivanov -

Impulse #3 – Podcast “Sounds like the truth. How neural networks learned to mimic speech.”

I listened to a podcast on the history and development of neural networks and algorithms that worked with language and speech. It started with studying the very structure of language, not any particular language, but any language, looking for various common features in order to identify patterns and implement them in algorithms for recognizing and generating speech. Then followed the simplest algorithms, for example, the well-known function for button phones “T9”. Then came the simplest machine learning, neural networks learned from huge arrays of text and were able to predict answers. For example, such an algorithm can solve the simplest arithmetic problem without knowing arithmetic at all, it just knows that if there are “2” “+” and “2” in the text, the answer according to the probability theory will be “4”. At this stage, the neural network could already be useful, but it is not perfect at all. Such systems did not look at the whole sentence, but checked one word at a time, so they could produce an incoherent set of words if the sentence was constructed in an atypical way.

In 2015, a company called Open AI appeared, which would later turn the idea of language models upside down, but in the beginning, they were losing the technology race to Google. In 2022, Open AI releases ChatGPT, which was a turning point in how people perceive language models. Users use ChatGPT for literally everything: It to help write an essay, find a bug in code, formulate the right Google query, now it can already draw pictures, and so on.

ChatGPT is a great example of how new technology can be used in real life by real people, and the best part is that it is actually being used.

by daniil.ivanov -

Impulse #2 – Zerocoding courses, Glide.

In October, I took an intensive week-long zerocoding course. We learned how to make a working application for mobile devices using the Glide software. The assignment was to create an app for tracking personal finances so that users could more easily control their daily expenses. I found this quite interesting, especially in the context of my topic, as it directly relates to new technologies and how they can make our lives easier. If the concept of zerocoding is developed further, application development will be ten times faster.

In the course we developed the application interface, several functions such as for example filtering and categorizing expenses, and worked with the database.

by daniil.ivanov -

Impulse #1 – WUC Talk AI Strategy for UX Research (Ben Anyasodo)

During the World Usability Congress 2023 I attended a talk by Ben Anyasodo, who is Principal Research Consultant of Redrock Consulting. the topic immediately interested me, as I am generally interested in AI and new technologies, namely how they can be implemented in classic areas of design, such as UX research. It should be noted at once that the topic is quite ambiguous, it conceals a lot of pitfalls: the ethical side of the issue, privacy issue and so on.

During his presentation, the speaker gave several different examples of AI implementation to conduct UX research in the field. I would like to dwell on one example in more detail. One coffee shop had a video surveillance system that was connected to AI and recorded the work of the employees. It counted the number of cups that were dispensed by a particular barista. On the one hand, this seems like a good tool for measuring the efficiency of employees, but the work of a barista includes not just making coffee, but creating an atmosphere, communication, and just a friendly smile, which can be valued even more than the coffee itself. This is something that AI cannot measure in any way. I was so interested that I found a discussion on the Internet about this innovation and most users found the idea terrible. In fact, I tend to share this opinion, in my opinion, such an application of AI is more likely to harm the efficiency of an organization.

Anyway, the presentation was really entertaining, and gave me quite a few insights that I can use in my master thesis.