How we got an LLM to facilitate group authorship of a manifesto about AI tools.

Decoding the Essence of Memory with AI in Scent Replication

Squeezing creativity from an LLM

Rapidly prototyping a budget horoscope with AI

The idea of “Folk AI” has been around for awhile. What happens when anyone can create their own personal AI applications? So, here's an AI Chrome plugin that reveals the subtext of websites

Everyone on the call was holding up drawings of their dream treehouse. At IDEO, this type of thing isn’t totally unexpected; this is an example of a creative warmup, a short activity that gets everyone making and sharing in order to build creative energy and psychological safety amongst team members at the beginning of a meeting or working session. What was unusual this time was that an AI-powered parrot named Doodling Dave suggested we start our meeting this way.

what if you could learn everything you wanted to know about a product just by asking it directly? What would you ask for a pair of jeans, if these pants could talk?

In June, the National Eating Disorders Association decided to shut down an AI-powered chatbot called Tessa. “She” was supposed to serve as a 24-hour counselor for people dealing with eating disorders. Instead, psychologists and activists found Tessa was offering dieting tips.

The Federal City Council approached IDEO to lead a futuring workshop on reimagining Washington D.C.’s downtown in the post-COVID era. With many government employees now working remotely, the central business district’s identity needed to change. The goal of this workshop was to generate innovative ideas to sustainably bring people back and establish D.C. as a model post-COVID global city.

Getting AI to pronounce names correctly.

How I made a payphone that talks to the future.

Everything that surrounds us tells a story, from architecture to the furniture we use to the utensils we eat with and the fashion we wear. Materials help shape those stories, communicating how it’s meant to be used and how it needs to be cared for. Industrial Designers must consider material properties, colors, function, lifespan, and cost-effectiveness when bringing a physical design to market. And digital creators must think about the physical properties as if they were in the real world. At the moment, the only creative constraint is we’re limited to using the materials we know exist. But what if we could wave a creative “I-wish-wand” and design a material first?

Two Industrial Designers pick up the challenge to imagine a physical version of a Generative AI-enabled imaging device. What if I type more here?

Accessing Knowledge Beyond the LLM (aka Grounding an LLM)

Answer: To Be My Sycophant and Publish a Book

Capturing vibes, not photons

How To Use GPT-4 To Improve Your Personality

The Importance Of Explicit Prompts And Generative AI

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Or How Generative AI Can Make Ted Lasso Your New Chat Moderator

Are you using ChatGPT yet? If the answer is no, keep reading. For anyone whose day job involves creating things—proposals or presentations that require fact-finding, writing, imagery, and video—it's changing how we make stuff. Love it or fear it, generative AI may be our new co-worker. And to ensure this co-worker is ethical, friendly, and aligned with our intentions, we must first explore it.

A design researcher, a business designer, and a data scientist were sitting at a bar. It sounds like the setup of a joke, but the conversation was actually quite serious.

In November, we shared the story of Lotbot, an AI Slack bot we built to manage parking spots at our Cambridge studio. Long story short: In building Lotbot, we utterly misjudged its personality and found ourselves on the wrong end of a tiny tyrant.

We’re in the midst of a revolution. Intelligent machines are able to augment our humanity in ways that seem lifted straight out of science fiction. Self-driving cars, bipedal and quadrupedal robots, and even our thermostats learn from us and get smarter over time.

In the top floor of London’s Design Museum, as dozens of visitors walk by and the rain hits the windows, a woman speaks with an AI bot called Spirit. It asks her how many partners she would like to have if she can live until she is 150. She giggles and answers. “Just one—and that is because my husband is next to me.” According to Spirit’s analytics, her answer is 33% sad and 12% joyful.

The chaos began the day we moved into our new building. A little plot of land outside was the scene of the terror. Not only was our Cambridge parking lot too small for the number of people in our office—21 spots for about 60 employees—getting spaces for clients was a pain, there was a pile of poop in spot 16 that even a car couldn’t clear, and a neighborhood transient liked to sleep in spot 20. Instead of managing the workings inside the office, our employee experience team was suddenly tasked with assigning parking spots. It got so bad they were often working as a valet service in addition to their day jobs. So we built a bot to do it for us.