Conversational Design

As a designer I am very much interested in the design process and the tools used in the design process. One aspect that I find exceptionally interesting about the design process is how we communicate with one other specifically within the realm of verbal communication and conversation. Conversation and verbal communication was one of the first ways stories were passed down and still plays a very important role in our daily lives today from a quick chat in the hallway to formal presentations. As such I would like to wrap my thesis around this idea and create a tool to augment the design process from verbal input. Along the way we will explore the role that conversation and vocal communication plays in design. If you would like a more in depth look at my thoughs feel free to read my paper.

I started by looking at what a design process could look like and came up what is shown above. The idea that designers either receive a prompt with the problem or find a problem to solve then jump into understanding the problem. Below I have created a storyboard that could be one injection of my design assistant into the “understanding the problem” phase of the design process. Throughout this project I would like to continue expanding what a design process is as well as create more scenario storyboards for each place where I see a useful injection of the design assistant.

For several years now I have been exploring the design process and tools that exist in the space as well as designing new tools to solve certain pain points. One of the first projects that explored this was Esporre, which explored the portfolio process, archiving storing and showcasing your work. Esporre has now evolved into, Processly, which looks at the process of producing work and how we work. Another aspect that I am very interested is that of color and the role color plays in our designs, which has lead me to thinking about several tools that could improve the space. One experiment of that is Jasper, a color bot with the idea to expand your color vocabulary and provide a new source of inspiration, as a bot this project also explores the space of conversational design, bringing it full circle.

One aspect of Jasper or any bot interaction that I would like to call out is that of personality and the seamlessness of the interactions with a piece of technology. These interactions are critical as it holds together the product. As I mention in my paper seamlessness and a huge margin of error is important as we never know how users will interaction. Whether be with an emoji, fragmented sentence or full sentences. And this varies across many areas including cultures, individual personalities and disciplines.

Process