Peter Lloyd

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being viewed as a creative partner rather than as a tool. How to design such collaborations is still a subject of speculation. In this pictorial, we propose a collaborative role for AI to prompt self-reflection. We explore this through a practice-based inquiry of whether and how AI could help a designer reflect on and relate to their own work. Three designers annotate a collection of images representing their fascinations, with subjective labels, indicating different dimensions of their visual concepts. These labels are used to teach an object detection model the designers’ perspectives. Then, they used this trained model on their own design work to evaluate the AI's potential to prompt self-reflection. By describing this process of AI-training we explore how an AI can help us become aware of our own implicit perspectives.

How can we develop products that consumers want to use for longer? The lifetime of electrical products is an ongoing concern in discussions about the circular economy. It is an issue that begins at an industry level, but that directly influences the way in which consumers use and discard products. Through a series of workshops and knowledge exchange sessions with Philips Lighting, this paper identifies which design factors influence a consumer’s tendency to retain their products for longer. These were distilled into a guiding framework for new product developers—The Emotional Durability Design Nine—consisting of nine themes: relationships, narratives, identity, imagination, conversations, consciousness, integrity, materiality, and evolvability. These nine themes are complemented by 38 strategies that help in the development of more emotionally engaging product experiences. We propose that the framework can be applied at multiple points during the new product development process to increase the likelihood that ‘emotion building’ features are integrated into an end product.