Session: DTM-11: Artificial Intelligence and Design 1

Paper Number: 143560

143560 - Human-AI Collaboration Among Engineering and Design Professionals: Three Strategies of Generative AI Use 

Designers are increasingly using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in design processes; however, knowing how designers use GenAI--especially in professional design practice--is under-explored. This paper presents an ethnographic study of a design team at NASA that explores the natural variation of GenAI use across team members during a speculative design workflow. We aimed to uncover when, how, and why GenAI tools were or were not employed using ethnographic observations to map the team's speculative design process and follow-up interviews to provide deeper insights into team members' interactions (or lackthereof) with GenAI. Through inductive qualitative coding, our analysis revealed three strategies of GenAI use observed among professional engineers and designers--intimate co-design with GenAI, selective delegation to GenAI, and minimal use of GenAI--as well as factors that appeared to influence their decisions whether or not to use GenAI. This study proposes new theory in human-AI collaboration that sheds light on the strategies, rationale, and circumstances under which design professionals use GenAI. Future work that builds upon these insights include examining a larger sample size of engineering and design professionals in uncontrolled design process experiences and exploring the impact that design tasks, goals, and constraints have on a participants decision to leverage GenAI tools.

Presenting Author: Kevin Ma University of California, Berkeley

Presenting Author Biography: A 2nd year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering specializing in the subtopic of design thinking, machine learning, and human-AI interaction

Authors:

Kevin Ma University of California, Berkeley
George Moore Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Vikram Shyam NASA Glenn Research Center
James Villarrubia NASA Headquarters
Kosa Goucher-Lambert University of California, Berkeley
Eric Reynolds Brubaker NASA Langley Research Center