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Generative AI presents a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction. It's an opportunity for product design, interaction design, organizational design, and design theory generally. If the models come through on their promise, conversation will provide us with a new modality for interaction with countless products, apps, and experiences. Combined conversation and image, video, and camera will only add to this. These changes will demand new approaches to communicating with AI and interacting with its responses and outputs. To date, much of this has been in the domain of NLP and machine learning developers. More should be taken up by user experience and interaction design.

My interest in UX has always been supplemented by an interest in technology and society. Over the years this coupling has become ever tighter and more problematic. AI promises to intensify this coupling even further, causing impacts on people and society in ways that previous technologies, including social and digital generally, have not. AI will cause us to reassess our ideas and expectations of intelligence, authorship, creativity, trust, and integrity. The technology industry will not supply answers, and designers can and should play a role in AI's evolution.

We learned from social media and social platforms that social technologies have social consequences. That the changes wrought by mediation of interaction and communication, of presence and of relationships, cause downstream impacts. Generative AI will do the same, and while not yet being a social engine, will soon disrupt and possibly corrode social and knowledge platforms profoundly. As we adapt to AI's "cognitive" abilities, we will have to reconfigure many forms of knowledge and creative work. Design can and should play a role here. But we will need new concepts.

The developer community is busy and AI continues to evolve at a dizzying pace. I have now read possibly two thousand AI whitepapers, focusing on conversational AI, question-answer systems, recommender systems, personalization, personas, psychology and AI, agents, reasoning, domain-specific AI, and more. I look forward to making some contribution to the social interaction and communication side of the technology in the years to come.

Principles of Social Interaction Design (SxD): An Essay (2012)

An exploration of the key concepts of social interaction design, from the logic of online social interaction to reflections on designing social tools and user experiences. I break down the relationship between individual user and social practices relate to common interface design aspects of social tools, sites, and software.

Download PDF: Principles of Social Interaction Design (SxD): An Essay




Selected Medium.com & SxD blog posts








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