CULTURALLY GROUNDED SPECULATION: FRAMEWORK FOR ETHNOGRAPHY INFORMED AI-DRIVEN DESIGN FOR DIVERSE FUTURES
Year: 2024
Editor: Grierson, Hilary; Bohemia, Erik; Buck, Lyndon
Author: Chen, Chen; Lucchini, Ariane; Simpson, Victoria
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Royal College of Art, United Kingdom; Imperial College London, United Kingdom; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Page(s): 294 - 299
DOI number: 10.35199/EPDE.2024.50
ISBN: 978-1-912254-200
ISSN: 3005-4753
Abstract
This paper proposes a novel design process that uses ethnographic research principles to create generative AI outputs for future product design ideation contextually based in a specific culture. The process is geared towards design professionals and students considering sociocultural settings with a particular benefit to those providing design solutions in cultural contexts different from their own. Increasingly, to tackle complex social and political issues within their work, designers are being asked to take the role of applied behavioural scientists. To prepare designers for these demands, design education must move to focus more on social and behavioural sciences, training students to be practitioners with an acute awareness of people and the societies they inhabit, as well as available science and evolving technology. This need is particularly relevant when it comes to speculative and futures design practices, a field which has been accused of producing outputs that are designed, engineered, and presented in a western vacuum. This is detrimental when speculative and futures design’s purpose is to imagine the varying possibilities presented by emerging technology. This process proposes a method for addressing this gap, by allowing designers to robustly imagine how future trends and technologies might fit into a wider variety of cultural contexts. When approaching this challenge within modern design education, the issue is compounded by the increasing prevalence of generative AI as a design tool. Currently, biases from designers and developers are being coded into the technology itself. However, the rising field of AI Ethnography comes as a solution to address these issues - ethnography as the study of people, behaviour, and culture can provide explainability and context to AI development. With this notion in mind, the proposed process for future product design incorporates ethnographic principles such as observations, interviews and photographic artefact collection for primary data to be fed into generative AI products as the basis for image generation. Following this, the process guides designers in analysing and extracting pertinent information to engineer prompts that generate representative images of how future trends may play out in a given cultural context. The images produced will be socioculturally informed and will provide designers with a starting point for inspiration with which they can iterate upon for speculative design production. The process is illustrated in a physical book to guide creatives in sensitively incorporating these principles and outlined steps into their practice. The proposed process exemplifies the view that emerging AI technologies are not replacements for human abilities but as augmentations that, if engaged with responsibility, can provide a new layer of intelligent sociocultural considerations for creatives to refer to in their design process and evaluate with the communities affected.
Keywords: AI Ethnography, Speculative Product Design, Futures, Cultural Design