Knowledge elicitation can be mediated by technology interfaces (Boy, 1997). The process of creativity relies on ideating and deciding among choices, which gives birth to new conditions. Design thinking provides a streamlined framework under which the creative process can be continuously practised to optimize choices into marketable innovation. Good ideas are intellectual assets, and in today’s world of business, the design of new products, features, processes or brand names can be monetized through patents, copyrights and trademarks. But how are creative ideas generated, converted into practical knowledge, and managed to derive customer value and business intelligence?
Our work in this analysis has been built upon previous research conducted in the field of participatory design and group decision making theory. Traditionally, focus groups and brainstorming sessions are used to elicit ideas. The main challenges of these approaches and their variants are predicated on the complex social dynamics that are inherent to group decision making. Both focus groups and brainstorms are limited by the number of participants that can contribute within a bounded timeframe and physical space. Both are synchronous, time-consuming methods that do not scale and are relatively difficult to document.
Our target users are design team members or creative individuals who are primarily responsible for the ideation process in research and development projects whether in corporations, governments or less formal organizations. In this Uber-competitive landscape, agile methods of knowledge elicitation that satisfy the needs of end users and stakeholders are imperative to generate innovation.
Historically, design teams rely on feedback from disparate user groups using research methods to elicit ideas and draw conclusions for design. However, some design ideas plagued by outdated processes and infected by unavoidable politics. Consequently, these phenomena lead to inefficient design sessions as well as products that amplify the biases of the more dominant and extroverted participants from design sessions.
In our previous research, two realistic scenarios were conducted that generated useful results. The participants were members of design teams, including the facilitators and participants. Similar to the target users, the participants were familiar with web applications, email, computers and mobile devices. The exploratory research leveraged use cases with different levels of interaction and different group compositions (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous).
The first scenario was conducted using the traditional GEM, and involved a research team of graduate students who sought to redesign an optimized organizational structure for delivering university services. The second scenario involved a NASA Hackathon design team that was seeking to answer the design question around enhancing space crew health that could be sustained from outer space and be controlled through remote communications on earth. The design team comprised a multidisciplinary team of human-centered designer, mechanical engineer and computer engineer.
The new solution was modeled from the successes and failures of e-GEM, which sought to enhance the traditional GEM. From the outset, the long-term goal of this research project is to lay a foundation for an operational “Usability and UX methods bank” that can be commercialized for industrial applications. However, that vision has been pivoted in order to scale within a better-primed market.
The e-GEM application was web-based, and so is the new solution. However, the problem statement was revised based on evidence that emerged from the work done on the previous e-GEM as well recent accounts from a targeted sequence of interviews and meetings. How can innovators generate ideas leveraging smart voices inside and outside their head?
The proposed solution will help teams and individuals to add value to their innovations through natural conversations with artificial agents. The new solution, called NAILA, exploits Artificial Intelligence in the form of natural language understanding and generation. It was designed to fully abstract e-GEM, and subsume other brainstorming and brainwriting ideation predecessors.
Design Thinking was utilized as an empathetic human-centered framework to structure the creative process by mitigating risks of creating a misaligned prototype. Our core research driver was that of empathy. Research methods used in the process included Questions, Options, Criteria to make decisions on the following design questions after careful consideration of the practical options using a set of relevant criteria.
User Personas were reviewed and tweaked for the key end users involved in the GEM i.e. the facilitator and the participant. The Scenario-based Design approach was used to test the suitability of the user personas and to construct practical use cases and scenarios that informed the development of the storyboard and wireframes that were used to mockup the system design in order to facilitate rapid prototyping and generate a visual representation.
In conclusion, our new solution will generate an agent-based participatory design methodology and a modular service-oriented web platform capable of scale. The competitive advantage of the solution lies in the naturalized agent-based emulation, which makes the end user immune to spatiotemporal discontinuity. The solution aims to allow end users to work with teams of conversational AIs.
Troy W.
Troy's research focuses on the human-centered design and development of cognitive augmentation technologies that enhance knowledge work. Barbados' national expert for mobile innovation under the World Summit Awards, Troy has been board-certified as an associate human factors professional.