Food for thought
What if AI could help us navigate creative block without taking away our agency?
As creatives, we often get stuck, either too many thoughts to make sense of, or too little to think of an idea.
Recently, people have also started using AI to get unstuck. AI chatbots often give leading answers or generate ideas themselves, influencing our decision making.
What if, AI helped us navigate through this ambiguity of a creative block, without influencing our ideas?
Proposed Solution
We built a web app to embody this approach towards AI. Starting off with deciding the principles what AI should and shouldn't do. So that it becomes a true thinking partner without taking away control/agency of the user.
The app understands your problem, visualises your ambiguity as a mind map and gives you AI assisted design thinking tools (Persona, 5 whys, etc).
After iterating and testing with real problems and people from different creative and non creative fields, we've building and improving this tool.
Let's start with a simple design problem :
"I want to design an e-commerce website for my friend who owns a quirky fashion brand for the new generation."
Using AI chatbots:
Here:
AI inhibits the creative process of navigating through ambiguity.
You start building even without considering other directions.
You can't visualise your thoughts and things together at one place (which really helps in this ambiguous process)
In the chat based interaction, you often lose track of what happened earlier.
We can get around the "leading behaviour" of AI through smarter and detailed prompting, but it is also an added task.
But we cannot get around the other limitations as above.
Our approach: AI doesn't suggest, it helps you go through ambiguity, giving you
"Food for thought"
Also to represent our philosophy, we used the Neubrutalist visual style to make the platform feel like a cognitive workspace, breaking away from the 'polished minimalism & chat based layouts' common in AI products.
User journey
You start with a few questions, AI tries to understand your initial state of mind.
AI generates a mind map as a starting point, which you can play around with.
You can use basic AI options like, 'more directions', 'research' & 'surprise me' over any node in the mindmap to probe further
There are AI assisted design thinking tools grouped under "Understand", and "Ideate"
You can use any of them to help you come up with ideas.
After you have enough ideas, you can compare them using the tools under "Evaluate and decide", to decide the final direction
Right now, we are still expanding and improving this app, testing with real problems and people from different creative and non creative fields.
You can also give it a try, your feedback will be helpful. Click the "Help us improve" button on top right corner.
See the initial build in action:
Detailed case study available upon request.