Angela Xie | Experience Designer

User Research, UX Design, Prototyping

Lori - The UX of AI

Fall 2017
Sponsored by Cognizant
In Collaboration With Alex Palatucci and Kazumi Kanagawa
Keywords: Mobile App, Artificial Intelligence, Plant, Living Space, Future

INTRO

What role can design play in shaping how AI should be integrated into our everyday experiences?

We were challenged by Cognizant, a technology consulting company, to freely explore the future with the advancements in artificial intelligence and to create new experience paradigms.
Our team was interested in enhancing the connection between human and plants, which has been taking away by the emerging urbanization. We collaborated on each phase of research and ideation, while I was responsible for the UX/UI design of the mobile application.

FINAL PRODUCT

Our proposed system promotes a healthy living environment by creating a symbiosis between plants and its human caretaker. It is incorporated of a physical and digital system. Together they act as an intermediary that makes the caretaking relationship interactive and visible.

Physical Form

Mobile Robot - Lori
Inspired by Roombas, we designed the scale to be small so the bot can navigate in the home subtlety without being to attractive. It is responsible for collecting data about the user’s home.

Soil Sensor
The sensor was designed to mimic paper tabs that accompany plants in nurseries in order to identify the type of plant. It sits above the soil so the user can easily locate and remove it if there are any malfunctions or they decide to disable the service.

Digital Form

Mobile Application
The mobile app is a media for data presentation, as well as an enabler for plant-human daily interaction. It communicates with the users and learns about what schedule is best for their lifestyle.

INTERACTION WALKTHROUGH

Onboarding

Personalization | User Halo
The user can determine how much time he'd like to invest and what information to share with the system.

Recommendation

Personalization & Space Halo
Based on the user's profile, Lori recommends several plant options. The recommendations are also based on the living space data that Lori collects while traveling around the user's home.

PROBLEM

Why do some people opt out from taking care of house plants?

At most stage of our lives, we take care of something, but even knowing its low investment, not many of us opt to take care of a plant, how come?

Our explanatory research reveals that people get frustrated with their plant easily because it dies without telling you where went wrong. Plants are neither animate nor interactive, thus people won’t value them the same as pets. They feel indifferent when the plants die.

RESEARCH

Taking a closer look at personal space and lifestyle

Living space and routine lifestyle appeared frequently as a topic during our interview with the plant owners, so we decided to investigate what role do plants play in people’s personal space using two forms of generative research.

The first investigated the relationship of users and their living space, and the second looked at novice plant takers and their direct relationship with a new plant. With various activities, we expected to dig deeper into their personal experiences, which are sometimes hard to put into words and often inaccessible from interviews.

Opportunity Space

We learned from our research that although the new care-takers were firstly overwhelmed, their mood significantly elevated as the plant joined their daily routine. We then questioned:

1. Can AI lower the barrier for the care-taking process, thus to help more people become opened up to plants?
2. Can we enhance the existing care taking relationship and foster a healthier environment, by leveraging known data?

IDEATION

Along the research, we explored all sorts of care taking relationship: sometimes you put in a lot of effort and benefits a lot, sometimes things go the opposite. We summarized our ideas into the 5 AI products that each tackles at an area along the spectrum.

DECISION

We landed on our final product, in which the user are given the flexibility to choose what kind of relationship they want to claim. We aim at utilizing AI to create the user-, plant-, and living space-data halo, and thus to form a healthier environment through the personalization and personification process.