Giving Form to Smart Objects

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been highlighted as a design material in the HCI community. This acknowledgement is a call for interaction designers to consider intelligence as a resource for design. While this view is valid and well-grounded, it brings with it a need to better understand how intelligence as a design material can be used in formgiving practices. This chapter seeks to address this need by suggesting a new approach that integrates AI in the designer’s toolkit. This approach considers intelligence as being part of, and expressed through, an object's character, hereby integrating artificial intelligence into a product's form. We describe and discuss this approach by presenting and reflecting on our experiences in a design course where students were asked to give form to intelligent everyday objects in three iterative design cycles. We discuss the implications of our approach and findings within the frame of third wave HCI.