paper at chi24

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at CHI’24 (in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii 🏝️) a recent work “(Un)making AI Magic: A Design Taxonomy” developed with Dave Murray-Rust.

In this paper, we examine the role that enchantment plays in the design of AI things by constructing a taxonomy of design approaches that increase or decrease the perception of magic and enchantment. We start from the design discourse surrounding recent developments in AI technologies, highlighting specific interaction qualities such as algorithmic uncertainties and errors and articulating relations to the rhetoric of magic and supernatural thinking. Through analyzing and reflecting upon 52 students’ design projects from two editions of a Masters course in design and AI, we identify seven design principles and unpack the effects of each in terms of enchantment and disenchantment. We conclude by articulating ways in which this taxonomy can be approached and appropriated by design/HCI practitioners, especially to support exploration and reflexivity.

Here you can watch the pre-recorded video presentation about our paper.