Behind the door of the graduate graphic design studio in Brooks Hall, the sometimes intimidating and increasingly influential future of technology is being approached with unwavering passion. The future may be within arm’s length or miles away without the right chances being taken and the right theories being put into practice.

When it comes to the high-stakes area of artificial intelligence (AI), the graphic design students of Graduate Graphic Design Studio III face uncertainty. AI is still a new realm with trails left to blaze; it’s characterized by the paradoxical situation of developing complex technology to provide very simple, user-friendly functions.

The class focuses on the objective of taking this technology to rethink interface design to meet the needs of all individuals while lowering barriers to access. However, the power of this technology comes with responsibility. The students spend weekday afternoons in the studio with their professor, Helen Armstrong, discussing the implications of this new technology and the ethics involved with it.

The graduate student class was tasked with a case study project approaching a new form of AI known as Conversational User Interface (CUI), which is designed to function and interact like humans as much as possible. Each student tailored their approach to their personalities and stories.

Shadrick Addy is a graduate graphic design student who has developed a remarkable CUI project that examines and builds upon one of the most familiar forms of AI in the modern age: Apple’s Siri.

The project proposes the AI alternatively named as Kulema, lovingly named after one of Addy’s nieces. Though it is similar to Siri, Kulema surpasses it in accessibility and independence, uniquely designed to be autonomous.

“Kulema is a futuristic iPhone CUI that dares to help you with your daily activities, and her personality is that she has vested interest in your life so she can act on behalf of you without necessarily needing your approval,” Addy said. “You can adjust her level of autonomy and customize her involvement in your life.”

Addy said Kulema has many functional advantages over Siri. She understands natural language processing, even potentially different dialects of English, for which Siri is severely limited in understanding. Kulema can remember important information, like professors’ names and schedules, and place them in context during assistance, remembering past conversations to continually improve her interactions in the future. 

“She can imitate my voice and speak on behalf of me on the phone, even in person,” Addy said. “It’s my favorite attribute, which is voice synchronization. She can synchronize my voice with hers, and she can answer and make phone calls on my behalf. If I need to make an appointment, she makes it based on my schedule.”

Addy demonstrated Kulema doing this through a video simulation in which he receives a call and she asks if he’d like to take it. Instead, Addy instructs her to take it for him. Kulema picks up the call and speaks with basic phrases and responses, making appointments for him all while using his voice. Afterward, he asks her to report to him what the conversation was about, a command for which she provides a transcript of the phone conversation and of past ones, too.

Addy then scolds her for rescheduling an appointment in conflict with his schedule without his permission and tells her sternly to notify him before she does it again, to which Kulema responded, “Understood, I have updated your customization preference.”

The exploration extends to Matt Babb, a fellow graduate design student and AI designer who approached CUI in his project from a gamer’s perspective. In its early stages, Babb is designing a CUI that assists users as they play games in which players often get enraged. Impatient in the struggle to meet the demands of victory in the midst of wide competition, players in mass online multiplayer games in Xbox and Playstation platforms can find guidance through this form of CUI.

“This CUI senses frustration in your voice as you play and so that’s what the cue is to start it,” Babb said. “When I ran into a problem, like pulling shots in this case, it [the CUI] asked if I wanted a suggestion to improve my game and shows me a replay of what I did.”

This in turn makes the CUI a therapeutic assistant to users in the oftentimes frustrating world of fast-paced gaming.

In the same graphic design class, graduate graphic design student Alysa Buchanan explored the intersection of AI with interpersonal relationships as part of an idea to motivate herself to use her phone, which she doesn’t enjoy as much as others.

“I kind of advocate for people to put down technology to connect in a more traditional manner,” Buchanan said. “So I asked myself, ‘How can I create a CUI that makes me want to use it, since my problem is that I just don’t want to.”

Her CUI project uses visual storytelling to create attractive urban and natural scenery, something that Buchanan enjoys, to illustrate communication in friendships and relationships. The two people in a relationship use the CUI to suggest interactions between one another, and the CUIs communicate with each other as well. Constant positive interactions encouraged by the AI of the project will yield the blossoming of trees as the relationships grow.

Interestingly, once arguments will break out, the scenery will grow dark, and it will rain. Once the people in a relationship lack in communication and proximity, the CUI of each person will tell the users to contact one another once again. 

Related to Buchanan’s project, graphic design student Jessye Holmgren approached the use of AI to inspire healthy relationships between AI and user with the mission to “inspire empathy of users through limited program conversation,” which meant developing a character named Bebop who is an assistant to the user. It will only operate through kind and polite conversation and discourage negative behavior from AI users. If Bebop is shown anger, aggression or impatience, his character will demonstrate physical pain and say, “Ow, that hurts me.”

Being rude to Bebop will make him get a black eye, rendering him incapable of assisting users with photo-related requests since he cannot “see” because he is hurt. Inversely, compassion and empathy will reverse his injuries.

The students each boast their own attributes and aspirations in their studies. Addy hopes to improve on his work for years to come and eventually share with those in his home country of Liberia through the possibility of starting a design school there.

Addy and his classmates sit on projects that they can potentially share to companies and then the world.

“I think we’re all kind of working towards that,” Addy said. “Even if we don’t propose them, the whole aspect of this project was to promote conversations and to get people thinking about the potential of these technologies and the implications of them and see how far we can push it.”

Addy, Babb, Buchanan and Holmgren, along with the rest of their classmates, are pioneers at the frontier of this trek into the future and reality. Technology is becoming an intrinsic part of our relationships, communication, linguistics and an imprint of our culture as whole. These students are designing the criteria which people will use to decide the degree to which they will accept a phenomenon as intimate or human, as AI in their lives.