Contact email
Aron Lindberg (primary contact) (aron.lindberg@stevens.edu)
Stefan Seidel (stefan.seidel@uni.li)
Tuure Tuunanen (tuure@tuunanen.fi)
Rikard Lindgren (rikard.lindgren@ait.gu.se)
Kalle Lyytinen (kalle@case.edu)
The Tutorial will be held on June 10, at Stockholm University’s Kista campus
Description of Workshop/Tutorial
Innovators and systems designers in a wide range of areas, such as architecture, semiconductor chip design, video game development, industrial design, and construction, increasingly use smarter and largely autonomous tools to generate better designs. Such tools are increasingly acquiring autonomy and learning capabilities, thus prompting interactions between humans and machines to change as the latter gain more intelligence (Seidel, Berente, Lindberg, et al. 2018).
Design resulting from such interactions are often novel and useful, i.e. innovative (Amabile 1996; Leonard-Barton 1998). Autonomous tools deploy software that undergird artificial intelligence (AI) methods such as machine learning, pattern recognition, meta-heuristics, and evolutionary algorithms to generate design artifacts beyond the capabilities of most—or maybe any—humans. Such tools allow designers to algorithmically generate a solution space based on certain parameters, within which outcomes are generated. The autonomous generation of design outcomes is also known as procedural generation (Hendrikx et al. 2011), procedural modeling (Mnih et al. 2015), and even computational creativity (Liapis et al. 2014).
Using autonomous design tools fundamentally revamps the process of innovation and design. Tasks that were formerly conducted by human designers are now conducted by tools. Designers must understand how tools can be used, and they must be able to evaluate the outcomes that autonomous tools generate. Moreover, tools must be developed and adjusted to match the designers’ understanding of the overall innovation process, and these decisions with regards to the tool become part of the overall design endeavor (Seidel, Berente, Martinez, et al. 2018.)
We know little about how AI-based methods will change design practices, necessary competencies, and associated organizational arrangements. As these developments represent areas of broad interest to industry and society at large, it is incumbent on us as researchers to begin to formulate concrete research agendas. To facilitate this process, we propose a workshop to outline the key concerns and research directions that the application of AI methods and thinking machines to design will entail. We will specifically consider the implications of AI for design science research, organizational scholarship, and IS-oriented studies of design and innovation.
If the number of registered attendants grows large, we will invite a number of specific contributors who will help facilitate the roundtable discussions. Other participants are not asked to submit any contributions before the actual workshop.
References
Amabile, T. 1996. Creativity in Context, Westview Press.
Hendrikx, M., Meijer, S., Van Der Velden, J., and Iosup, A. 2011. “Procedural Content Generation for Games: A Survey,” ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (February), pp. 1–24.
Leonard-Barton, D. 1998. Wellsprings of Knowledge : Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation, Harvard Business School Press.
Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G. N., and Togelius, J. 2014. “Computational Game Creativity,” Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computational Creativity, pp. 46–53.
Mnih, V., Kavukcuoglu, K., Silver, D., Rusu, A. A., Veness, J., Bellemare, M. G., Graves, A., Riedmiller, M., Fidjeland, A. K., Ostrovski, G., Petersen, S., Beattie, C., Sadik, A., Antonoglou, I., King, H., Kumaran, D., Wierstra, D., Legg, S., and Hassabis, D. 2015. “Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning,” Nature (518:7540), Nature Publishing Group, pp. 529–533.
Seidel, S., Berente, N., Lindberg, A., Lyytinen, K., and Nickerson, J. V. 2018. “Autonomous Tools and Design: A Triple-Loop Approach to Human-Machine Learning,” Communications of the ACM (62:1), pp. 50–57.
Seidel, S., Berente, N., Martinez, B., Lindberg, A., Lyytinen, K., and Nickerson, J. V. 2018. “Autonomous Tools in System Design: Reflective Practice in Ubisofts Ghost Recon Wildlands Project,” Computer (51:10), pp. 16–23.
Submission Requirements/Limits
No Submissions or Submission Requirement – attendance is at the discretion of attendees, although the venue will support a maximum of 50 attendees
Facilitating individuals, their institutions and contact emails
Aron Lindberg (primary contact) (aron.lindberg@stevens.edu), School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology.
Stefan Seidel (stefan.seidel@uni.li), Institute of Information Systems at the University of Liechtenstein.
Tuure Tuunanen (tuure@tuunanen.fi), Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä and Center for Service Leadership at Arizona State University.
Rikard Lindgren (rikard.lindgren@ait.gu.se), University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Kalle Lyytinen (kalle@case.edu), Case Western Reserve University, and Aalto University, Finland.
