AI Exploration: Puzzle Counter
The Origin of the Idea
My first real foray into AI-first design had its genesis in an offhand conversation my wife and I were having after she had returned from a charity shop with a new puzzle. I watched as she eagerly spread all of the pieces out on the table in preparation for a marathon of puzzling. She was meticulous in her setup, ensuring each piece was right-side up and in a single layer, and then spent the next half hour slowly working on the puzzle from the outside in. At that point, it started to become clear to her that the puzzle was wasn’t actually complete. There were clearly some gaps with no pieces to fill them.
Re-enactment of the exact moment Christina realized some of the pieces weren’t there.
She had spent about an hour preparing and then beginning the puzzle before having to deflatedly take apart the partially-complete puzzle and put it back into the box before relegating the once-coveted puzzle to the trash. She took it in stride, but this disappointment had the opposite effect as the zen-like act of methodical piece-by-piece creation she was seeking when buying the puzzle.
Seeing this and knowing that it wasn’t the first time, I had the very designer thought of “what if there was a way to avoid this and what would that look like.” Conveniently, I was also currently thinking about projects that would work well to support a foray into AI-first design. An app that had a limited purpose, such as counting puzzle pieces seemed like a great option since it was concrete with a constrained scope, had enough complexity that there could be meaningful differences and assumptions across the different tools, and solves a real user problem that that I could judge the systems’ output against.
My Approach
What I hope to do with this project is to use AI tools across all steps of an end-to-end design process from wireframe to prototype (with the stretch goal of building it in code). I am hoping that by the end of this process I will have used a variety of AI tools for ideation, wireframes, visual design, prototypes, PRDs, and code. The end goal will be to not only have a pretty cool app design (🤞), but also have a good sense of:
What tools are out there and what tasks they are best suited for
What is the overall maturity of these AI design tools
How AI might be integrated into existing design workflows vs. whether we would benefit from an overall rethinking of how we approach our projects
Start to piece together where less experienced designers fit into the process when things like wireframing can start to be done much more quickly by AI tools. In other words, how can I provide teachable moments when some of the work will be done by a black box
Although the discrete steps may look similar to what we’ve done in the past, AI promises to amplify our efforts from initial research and ideation through to prototyping and delivering. The question will be how to best couple AI’s speed and volume of output with the designers mastery of context, taste, and humanity. Source: The Design Council
Ultimately, this project will give me an opportunity to look deeply at some powerful and very exciting new tools that will surely become part of how we do things. I think it is very clear that, even if the steps of the design process continue on as normal, there is a new and powerful participant that will be at the table to drastically expand our ability to explore and ideate quickly and prototype and even build in ways we haven’t been able to do before. This will be especially true for smaller orgs and design teams who may not have had the headcount to involve multiple designers and technologists on every project.