Why it matters
In 2019, the design industry was being told to design for AI. The how was almost completely absent.
Most existing resources came from engineering or business strategy - useful for some, but disconnected from how designers actually work: through prompts, sketches, worksheets, alignment exercises. The AI Meets Design Toolkit set out to fill that gap. Eight months of research, practitioner interviews, and academic review went into a free, downloadable kit that designers could pick up and use. The objective: help designers, creatives, and innovators mindfully navigate the product development process and turn AI into social, user, and business value, human-centered applications & meaningful user experiences.
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How we did it
The aim was to turn the messy reality of building AI products into something a designer could pick up and use - not a textbook, not a manifesto, but a set of concrete worksheets and prompts that bridge designer-engineer conversations.
The toolkit's structure was the methodology. Eight distinct components, each designed for a different stage of an AI project: a crash course for context, opportunity-spotting prompts based on user needs and AI capabilities, exercises to align designers with ML engineers on model tasks and metrics, service blueprint mapping, feasibility/viability/desirability assessments, value tension worksheets, and a map of 9 UX and design challenges of AI as a material. The toolkit was built to be used, not read - and the worksheet-driven structure is what made it travel into so many curricula and team rooms.
What we made
Inside the toolkit you'll find:
A 2-page crash course in AI/ML to help you get up to speed on different types and tasks of artificial intelligence & machine learning
Prompts to start spotting opportunities based on user needs, AI capabilities, and datasets
Exercises to align with your machine learning engineers & data scientists on the model task and objectives, confusion matrix, and evaluation metrics
Worksheets to align designers, engineers & BA’s
Service blueprint opportunity mapping
Assessing feasibility, viability & desirability of AI ideas
Worksheets to make value tensions explicit and anticipate (unintended) consequences
An overview of 9 UX and design challenges of AI as a material
The full toolkit & worksheets are available as downloadable PDFs for free.
More projects.
(2019-25©)
