Rhea Alexander
Generative AI in Teaching, for Design Strategy Capstone
Students develop a strategic plan for bringing a concept to implementation. Working in teams on ideas developed in the preceding Design Research Capstone Studio, students leverage complementary backgrounds, skills, and networks to advance their projects. Course activities include outreach to external partners, experts, groups, potential investors, and other stakeholders, developing networks of trust and links to potential future partners and employers.
Faculty Reflection
Most students willingly experimented with infusing AI products into their workflow, from data analysis, data synthesis, image creation, presentation design, data visualization, to enhance product development, and more. To stay relevant, we need to advance student’s technical and analytical skills for collaborative intelligence. Within given parameters students explored tools, honed their practice and evaluated their impact.
Hindrances:
- Time poverty, a chronic problem for students & faculty to experiment & reflect when not an explicit part of deliverables.
- Mundane responses from bad prompts.
- Biases found in the output
- Hallucinations and misinformation
- Lack of knowing when AI in embedded in products and how to cite it
Benefits:
- A safe space to experiment with tools that are accessible (free or freemium model)
- A positive support to help analyze and synthesize collected data such as interviews, cross check results, and create next steps.
- An efficient tool to save time across the workflow for tasks like organizing, ideation, synthesizing ideas, generating artifacts, image generation for concept development and rendering.
- Support to think through, test, and create artifacts, rapid prototypes, and procedures or maps
- Helps to synthesize complex sets of data, make connections across disparate data points
- Helps ideate
Next Steps:
Continue to build out the ethical use and parameters of AI use in the innovation process, including building project copilots to expedite and facilitate research.
Curriculum and Student Projects
Capstone Class Primer
Integration into MS SDM Capstone Projects
Testing and implementing the Stingray Method. We embedded AI within our methodology, from concept testing and strategy development to prototype and assumption testing, brand voice testing, business model, and service value testing:
- Concept Development
- How AI Can Help Concept Test
- Advantages for Leveraging AI in Concept Development and Evaluation
- Balancing Human Interaction and Mindfulness Around Inherent Bias
- Safety and Surveillance on AI Platforms
The Report should show two iterations of at least three actions/functionalities:
1. around the product/service
2. around the business model
3. around the brand voice
There must be evidence of a learning curve through failure and a refined version based on the learnings that will be tested again.
There must be evidence of how you leveraged AI tools to test and build in this short time, including how you used them, prompts, and links to tools, and how you cross-checked content or data for biases or hallucinations, if appropriate.
The tests need to show the versions of the prototypes and testing scenarios, describe persons and situations, and list all outcomes and conclusions.
The report will be evaluated based on its completeness, structure (hierarchy of information), assessment of how you included AI tools and the outcome, and overall learning curve for conducting testing activities for the project. The report content will be part of your final presentation.
Student Projects
Explore the student projects below:
Caresync
Gyld
Kindship
