Viewpoint: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design Thinking

11/28/2017
Charle Burnette, PhD
charlesburnette@comcast.net

Abstract

An open ontological framework is used to outline a significant challenge facing Artificial Intelligence and
Design Thinking. In it similarities and differences between the disciplines are used to underscore the
opportunity and need for collaboration between them. It is suggested that AI could help Design Thinking
become more efficient and effective as Design Thinking helps AI become more human centered and
contextual.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Design Thinking, Interdisciplinary Thinking, Co-development

Introduction

Intelligence is the intentional and effective application of knowledge, learning, and experience.

In early definitions, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was simply defined as “intelligence exhibited by
machines”. The intelligence being exhibited was a human like response to a human communication.
Today, due to progress in neuroscience, computation, and programming techniques, the focus of AI has
shifted to modeling human intelligence, improving computational tools and media, and advancing goal-
oriented processing for complex interactive environments. Due to this shift, AI has found application in
almost every domain of human experience and now serves a great range of purposes. Its primary value is
to quickly, efficiently, and effectively get better results from the purposeful collection and analysis of
information. Its secondary value is in the development and application of digital technology to solve
problems or render services for commerce, medicine, environmental science, robotics, transportation,
communications and people. It is beginning to bring higher levels of performance to interactive
applications that involve human participation. Despite its progress, extended range, and efforts to simulate
human thought processes and behaviors, AI remains a matter of what machines are able to accomplish
with human guidance. It is this guidance, its purposes, values, and governance that remain most
problematic and uncertain.

Natural Intelligence is quite different from artificial intelligence. Individual human beings come equipped
at birth with a biological system through which their Natural Intelligence develops through interactive

1
learning from environments, experiences, information, and people in specific circumstances. Natural
Intelligence is focused, implemented, and acted on through purposeful human thought and action that is
responsive to human feelings, needs, and desires arising from situated experiences. In Natural
Intelligence, the human brain, body, and environment function together as a comprehensive biological
system for conducting thought and action. Within this embodied and situated context, purposeful thoughts
and actions are interpreted through perception, conception, and intentional thought. Cognitive techniques
such as focusing, objectivization, correlation, expression, processing, assessment, learning, and
assimilation facilitate goal directed thought, communication, and interaction. Modes become established
in cognition as purposeful agencies of thought. These agencies accomplish their specialized goals through
emotions, language, cognition and behaviors that are explored, adapted, reformulated, communicated,
assessed and assimilated as they are applied. Preferences, beliefs, histories, cultures, understanding,
personal knowledge, morals, and a sense of self develop naturally over time.

As currently practiced Design Thinking is the intuitively guided, purposeful, and pragmatic application of
Natural Intelligence to change situations, experiences, and services in practical, and useful ways.
Although professional designers use computers for administrative tasks, to facilitate communication, and
to produce technical documents and presentations, they apply Natural Intelligence in response to the
emotions, needs, desires, interests and concerns that arise from situations that people experience or
anticipate. They rely primarily on their experience and what they learn by working with users to develop
better products, services, communications, methods, and better experiences. However, everyone applies
Design Thinking when they think and act purposefully to resolve problematic situations. Because it is
human centered, purposeful, situated, self focussing, creative, practical, action oriented, and requires
critical judgment and reflection Design Thinking can help anyone gain the confidence and competence, to
navigate unfamiliar or problematic circumstances.

Both natural and artificial intelligences have their strengths and limitations. Natural Intelligence is fast,
responsive, and broad during subconscious thought, but structured, serial, slow, and subject to error and
misinterpretation during conscious thought, language use, learning, reflection, communication, and
collaboration. Human thought is always being reinterpreted, and adapted to address the situation, focus,
needs, desires, interests and concerns of the moment. It is dependent on the backgrounds, circumstances,
capabilities, and the "state of mind" of real human beings acting individually or collectively. Error
correction processes, learning, and the reflective application of acquired knowledge operate both
subconsciously and consciously within the context of goal oriented, situated thought. Meanings, purposes,
information, ideas, expressions, processes, and understandings can be regenerated while remaining
flexible and fungible until acted on.

2
Alternatively, Artificial Intelligence is often limited in its focus, formulation, expression, devices, and
responsiveness as well as by the objectives of those who pay for, program, and apply its components,
relationships, technology, and processes. But, once developed, tested, and accepted, its algorithms and
devices can be applied to track, recognize, analyze and act on similar information, circumstances, and
events, doing so consistently, accurately, and almost immediately. Despite being extremely fast, powerful,
and often ingeniously designed, the functionality of AI has not yet reached the level, adaptiveness, or
range of Natural Intelligence or exhibited its concern for human and environmental well being. The
products of AI do not typically support ongoing evaluation, allow human guidance, or serve human
centered objectives. The capabilities, models, strategies, technologies, and techniques of AI emerge from
different sources to serve so many purposes that it is difficult to learn which of its applications will have
positive rather than harmful outcomes in particular situations. Although simulations of Natural
Intelligence are improving and certain information can be sensed and processed automatically, raw
emotions, and feelings such as empathy, love, judgment, and other human capacities are not yet integral to
machine thinking. AI must find better ways to integrate human sensibilities, thought, and behavior into its
goals, processes, and products if human needs and desires are to be understood and acted on
appropriately. Those who apply Design Thinking can help AI gain the understandings and techniques
needed to assure positive outcomes appropriate to actual human needs and desires, while those who
develop and apply AI can help Design Thinking improve its depth, learning, and effectiveness.

Challenges

While artificial intelligence is pioneering entirely new ways of using advanced mathematics and
technologies to assimilate useful knowledge from large data bases, support pattern recognition in different
media, translate interactive communication, and transform activities in many fields, Design Thinking is
directly involved in learning how people think and act individually and collectively to establish and
achieve mutually satisfying situated objectives. Both fields need to work with one another to assure the
significance and usefulness of what they do. Both need to collaborate on projects in which advanced
techniques and technologies of value to both are developed and applied.

The following discussion seeks to characterize how challenges could be approached in a way that might
help Artificial Intelligence and Design Thinking formulate shared objectives. This is based on the belief
that both fields are committed to learning, understanding, and purposefully improving the situations they
address, AI through development and application of advanced technology, techniques, and knowledge and
Design Thinking through increased understanding of, sensitivity to, and application of practical skills and
human sensibilities to improve the quality of life and its environments. An ontological framework, open
to interpretation and elaboration to meet needs and desires in both fields, is used to articulate a challenge

3
in which both disciplines might collaborate. The hope is that those who work in both domains can use the
outline to explore aspects of their work and formulate a shared response to challenges of mutual concern.

Discussion

The following paragraph headings provide an ontological outline through which any project or
problematic situation can be profiled and purposefully addressed. The heading of each paragraph
identifies an aspect of the common subject to be developed to reflect the concerns of both fields.
Objectives emerge from the situation of concern, its background, and those in each field who work with
the subject of each paragraph.

Situatedness

Both Artificial Intelligence and Design Thinking deal with particular situations in order to better
understand, improve, and learn from them. Today these situations change rapidly, often in response to
changes in circumstances, environments, and the activities of others. Many design professionals,
including interaction designers, planners, service designers, industries, and government services, must
now constantly revise, update, or redirect what they do. As automated transportation, conversational
communication between people and machines, and mobile interactive robots, augmented and virtual
realities, self managing services, and analytics develop, the redesign of products, processes, and services
will become continuous and adaptive. Artificial Intelligence can learn from situations as they change if it
is designed to do so. Although its projects are often not continuous, Design Thinking provides a
responsive and flexible process in which a wide range of possibilities for rethinking, modifying, or
changing existing situations are considered and resolved, often through rapid prototyping and
collaboration with those effected. The challenge for both AI and Design Thinking is to recognize that the
integration of participatory human centered design into ongoing automated processes will be required.
Two challenges will be how to develop dynamically adaptive models of change that improve situations,
and how to help humans recognize and respond to change faster through more powerful, contextually
appropriate, and effective computationally facilitated processes. Integrated and timely response by
humans and machines to changing circumstances in situations of interest or concern is the problematic
focus for the following discussion.

Stances

Background, education, prior experience, knowledge, culture, emotions, and beliefs are major factors that
affect how people perceive, conceive, and respond to changing circumstances. Artificial Intelligence and

4
Design Thinking must help people individually and collectively respond appropriately and effectively to
continual change. They must become able to recognize what has happened, is happening, or will happen
in context and decide what information is worth considering and the stance and approach to take
regarding it. Both AI and Design Thinking need to model these issues in ways that structure them
appropriately, recognize relevant information, and quickly formulate responses to it. Potential
opportunities and reactions, context, issues and implications, intentional stances to guide subsequent
thought and action to implement and realize the appropriate response must be formulated. The challenge
to Design Thinking is to deeply research and characterize the intuitive decision making that designers
regularly apply, while developing practical, immediate, and inspiring ways to communicate intuitively
with others. The challenge for AI is to model intuition, a subconscious human process that purposefully
guides conscious executive thought to rapidly produce man/machine decisions.

Information

Information in and about a focal situation can be perceptual, conceptual, relevant responses to incoming
information , or be in forms that brain or machine can interpret and communicate. Design Thinkers often
solve problems by responding to their feelings, through open ended exploration, and by gathering
information from sources unfamiliar to them while constantly assessing its relevance and worth against
their cumulative feelings and growing knowledge. AI is extremely fast and effective when searching large
collections of consistently expressed descriptive data, correlating similar or matching information, and
training its algorithms to change performance through feedback from active processing, human guidance,
or statistical means. AI might conform its tools of search and analysis to the way designers deeply engage
problems by continuously reframing, and fitting information and resources to the possibilities and
constraints of problematic situations. Improved access, interpretation, and linking of information to
intentional objectives expressed in conversational forms of communications that automatically explore,
structure, adapt, analyze, and express potential outcomes would be helpful.

Modeling

Perceptual interpretation and conceptual modeling is at the heart of both creative and rational thought.
Intentional structuring and analysis of relevant networked information is needed to uncover potentials,
modes of communication appropriate to the situation, and effective processes for realizing desirable
outcomes. While design thinkers are skillful at generating and exploring meaningful ideas and concepts
regarding unfamiliar and uncertain circumstances, they are less able to definitively structure and analyze
elements and relationships underlying their ideations. They tend to rely on feelings, intuitions, and
experience to guide conceptual exploration and discrimination. The challenge for AI is to underpin this

5
largely subconscious exploration and structuring with extensive combinatorial exploration and methods to
assess “goodness of fit” between alternative elements and relationships. AI needs the creative imagination
and speed of human interpretation, intuition, and insight as much as Design Thinking needs the high
speed modeling and analysis of AI. Both are needed to develop extremely fast ways to model change and
respond appropriately to it.

Communication

Appropriate expression during interactive communication depends on how well apprehended “meanings”
suit the concerns of both source and recipient, whether human or machine. The challenge to
communication between AI and Design Thinking is how to preserve the essence of their different
messages regarding the focal subject. The source expression must fit the situation, its context, and
medium and be accurately translated by a receiving “brain” that may be biological, electronic,
mechanical, or organic. Translation is made difficult by the differences of expression between each
medium or person, their objectives and ways of working, and how a source’s knowledge and intentions
are interpreted by others. AI is deeply immersed in these issues as it seeks to implement digital assistants
in many forms. Design Thinking remains largely a human to human construction of shared
understandings in forms of expression that use both conventional and digital media. To permit human
judgment and adaptive response Design Thinking will need to adapt to the advanced technology of AI,
and its ability to automatically and rapidly recognize, merge, and display image content. The challenge
for both fields will be to implement this augmented communication in increasingly realistic, functional,
interactive, and creative simulations of ideas and outcomes as they evolve, are communicated and
experienced.

Processes
A deeply experiential and interactive response to situated change through continuing collaboration
between humans engaged in Design Thinking informed by machine learning using Artificial Intelligence
is suggested. Both disciplines apply learning processes that implement and express different points of
view, one human centered, the other machine based. Greater efficiency, effectiveness, and value should
result from interfacing these processes and integrating them where possible. To achieve this both fields
need to become more transparent in their processes and more responsible for its effects. Digital and
physical processes involved in making, doing and performing are increasingly being addressed through
data capture and analysis, robotics, real time feedback, augmented and virtual realities. In continuously
changing contexts such as those of self driving vehicles, AI will need to approach the level of error
detection and reliability present in human systems. Error correction processes that function like those of
biological systems to protect, enrich, and sustain life will be needed. Conversely, how insight,

6
recognition, intuition, imagination, and insight function in dynamic interaction between fast subconscious
and slower conscious processes of communication are not yet fully understood or operational. Yet making
emotionally charged, adaptive, and subconscious thought operational is crucial to processing continuing
change. The application of Neuroscience and common sense to structure more natural processes that
combine AI and Design Thinking should benefit the speed, quality, and effectiveness of purposeful
thought, communication, and behavior in both fields.

Value

Among the dimensions that play into how people judge and value things are needs and desires,
circumstances and feelings, skills and accomplishments, knowledge and beliefs, individual and collective
experiences, self and social achievements, health and happiness. While AI is very effective at uncovering
preferences and patterns of behavior it is not yet good at discovering motivations or feelings that arise
during interactive communication or that occur as contexts and circumstances change. Once an algorithm
is in operation it can lack flexibility and result in norms and interpretations that are not pertinent, or fail to
anticipate changes as they occur in either information or its context. Design Thinking is usually able to
switch context quickly while recognizing what is unfamiliar or of potential value in a situation or process.
The challenge in both fields is to develop open, yet reliable ways of quickly testing the validity and
usefulness of information, determining preferable outcomes, or drawing conclusions of value in context
as when one judges the appropriateness of a fabric for a partially furnished room, behavior at a social
event, or the effects of word use in a conversation. Such contextual evaluation is more difficult in rapidly
changing situations because appropriate conventions or norms for measuring qualities than quantities may
not be available.

Memory

Human memory is not just a repository, data base, catalog of prior experience, or cognitive resource. It is
constantly active on its own terms, filtering, prioritizing, assimilating, interpreting, adapting, and
reconstructing neural networks throughout the body and brain. As the primary link between what is
happening, what has happened, and what might happen in the future, human memory is resourceful,
interpretive, and influential regarding how people develop and express their beliefs, habits, cultures, and
other cumulative constructs. It actively traces, reinterprets, and explores past, current and future thoughts
and behaviors as it accumulates knowledge of self, others, and the worlds they share. Although people
objectify perceptions, and build, label, and recognize, meaningful objects of thought in memory, it is not a
stable reference source as the neural networks that embody and objectify information are constantly being
reorganized, pruned, added to, and reformulated based on what is salient in the moment or over time. AI

7
and Design Thinking are challenged to understand and model how people learn and adapt so quickly to
new information and situations. AI is constantly finding effective ways for machines to learn how to
learn. The use of recurring patterns of information derived from past experience to assist recognition,
adaptive interpretation, and categorizing is just one of the methods being explored. While AI is very
effective at finding patterns in information, communication, and behavior, it is not very good at
discriminating the richer contexts, emotions, and values involved. It very much needs the insightful
involvement of human brains, their emotional responses, and acquired feelings about what is meaningful,
helpful, and significant to life in a changing world where everything is a matter of interpretation. That is
why it is useful to have shared ontological frameworks in memory through which to address different
subjects, situations, and experiences. It is how “theoryless” thought can become “theoryful”.

Theory

A Theory of Design Thinking * provided the framework for the above discussion of the issue of
continuous change facing AI and Design Thinking. Each mode of thought from the theory was used to
consider the situated challenge from the point of view of each paragraph regarding a specific aspect of the
subject. For example, the paragraph labeled “Information” manifests the Referential mode of thought that,
in the theory, focuses on information and resources that might be useful in purposeful thought regarding a
focal subject. Other paragraphs apply Relational thought, Formative thought, Procedural thought,
Evaluative thought, and Reflective thought to the subject. All addressed the shared concern for speed,
depth, and potency in response to change in a focal subject. Reflective thought assimilated from each
stance suggested a shared development of advanced ways to model human/machine responses to change.
This development would focus on how Natural Intelligence draws information from subconscious into
conscious thought through intuitions, recognitions, imagination, and insight. Neuroscience is already
researching and documenting the underlying neural processes involved. AI and Design Thinking must
find practical ways to simulate these transitional processes between subconscious and conscious
purposeful thought if they wish to deal with complex, dynamically changing situations.

* Papers on A Theory of Design Thinking are available at www.independent.academia.edu/

charlesburnette.