Introduction to AI Product Design Course:
In my quest to stay at the forefront of design innovation, I enrolled in Avril Hsu's Intro to AI Product Design course through ELVTR. Avril, an inspiring Design Leader in Generative AI at Dell, brings a wealth of experience in AI-driven product design and innovation.
The course was structured over seven weeks and started November 25th, with live online sessions held on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8 PM EST. It's tailored for professionals like me-product designers, UX/UI designers, and creative professionals-aiming to leverage AI in our work. The curriculum covers essential AI/ML fundamentals, ethical AI considerations, multi-modality interactions, deep learning applications, neural networks, and generative AI. We also spent a great deal of time discussing the latest and greatest news on AI and its ever-evolving nature.
This class is a chance for me to delve into human-centered AI principles, prototyping, and inclusivity principles to create innovative, compliant, and user-focused solutions. Highly relevant in today's day and age.
My goal is to leave some thoughts on how each session landed with me to really help those concepts stick. So far, I've attended 5 sessions and am looking forward to applying this course in my next job.
Check out the course syllabus below, if interested:
Session 00: Meeting our INstructor and Taking the First step towards (My) AI Career
The day after Thanksgiving, Avril and the ELVTR team held a kickoff session for us eager students. They set the tone by grounding us in the landscape of AI through the years, while connecting its potential to real-world product design. We explored AI’s evolution and its transformative impact on industries, which was an eye-opener for me. I appreciated the focus on why designers need AI literacy-not just to build better products but to stay relevant in an increasingly tech-driven world. AI will be in the job market with an increasingly large presence in future roles.
One of the key takeaways was the simulation of a product designer’s role in an AI-driven transformation. It made me think critically about how to align AI capabilities with human needs, a challenge I’m excited to embrace in my projects.
Session 01: AI Fundamentals: Classic AI Approach
What really stood out to me in today's lecture was understanding how AI Technology and being literate in this day and age, was made clear by Avril's insistence that it is where the future is headed. The coolest part is that AI has been around since the 1950's with several iterations of what we understand to be machine learning and (technically) Artificial Intelligence today.
We learned about supervised models, machine learning, and the differences between what algorithms may begin to uncover. Very... very interesting.
Session 02: AI Fundamentals: today's AI Approach
So I had heard of LLMs - you know, large language models. But what I didn't know was the vast amount of other AI models like Recurrent Neural Networks and something she touched upon called RAG. We also spoke about dialogue capabilities in AI that comes from deep learning capabilities which require immense amounts of energy to fuel that processing power. There were several people who voted that they were concerned about the effects on the environment as a result of the energy required.
In the second half, Avril showed us a demo of several training models that allowed us to understand how large amounts of pixels, images, and data are used to code facial expressions for one example.
Session 03: AI To GEN AI Readiness: Latest Trends and Other emerging technologies
One big idea is when we spoke about Alexa as it was compared to older technologies. (We made sure to unplug our Alexas, Googles, Siris, and any IOTs for this one). We really were able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Generative AI modes, like Chat GPT and Claude.
One of the examples and real-world examples that came up was Gemini.... the one where the AI.... you know...told the child to unalive himself? With that great power comes great responsibliity. It was fascinating to see what will happen when Agents will be the only way we connect with companies from now on.
Session 04: Essential qualities needed to assess-Commercial AI Product Potential
So what is the difference between everyday AI and game-changing AI? It really opens you up to decipher the regulations and policies in a confusing world. The Use Case Prism from Gartner was cool to see because it visualized a few industries that have boons and pitfalls associated with all of the use cases for AI.
When is that human touch really needed, I wonder? I imagine with even a commercial AI product, being there for your customers at the right time will make all the difference in customer loyalty.
Session 05: Human-Centered AI Design Principles Throughout AI Product Development Lifecycle
With the human-centered AI principles that make all the difference for these generative AI companies, one of the biggest learnings was that Creativity will be the true way forward. I valued this statement since having productive learning is expected and standard, but with creativity at your fingertips and faster computing power, you can truly be more helpful and valuable than before.
My use case for the creative concierge and fun recommender that I had was that the problem space is missing a lot of personalization in this way. If, for example, it was possible to get really unique details on personality, preference, and social levels, you could come up with some unique experiences tailored to someone's true desires.