Together, let’s democratize AI through empathy and exploration.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have achieved major milestones in the past 5-7 years, such as the detection of skin cancer and breast cancer more reliably than trained clinicians, beating the world champion in Go, answering natural language questions about previously unseen Wikipedia articles without background knowledge at almost human performance levels, and more.

This progress is driven by advances in Machine Learning software and theory, compute power, and the availability of large datasets to learn from. AI has the potential to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges in areas like healthcare, education, transportation, communication, manufacturing, and many more. It is guaranteed to have a profound impact on how we all live, work, and play.

Design has the potential to explore and leverage these opportunities. Through empathy and experimentation, design (thinking) can help identify some of the risks early in the creation process, e.g. ensuring AI stays unbiased and inclusive. While the potential upside of AI is profound, there’s a need to apply thoughtful design to arrive at meaningful humanity-centered solutions.

How might we use Design (Thinking) to build for AI-powered futures?

The 2 day Pop-Out experience will give people the ability to find and define future-oriented provocations and prototype first solutions using the power of AI and frame broader implications for the world.

In the first session teams will use a design framework to find and define problems to eventually synthesize their findings into a powerful provocation and problem statement. In the second session, teams will start by exploring Machine Learning methods underlying AI including an AI expert guest lecture from Google’s Director of Research, to then leverage basic Machine Learning concepts to design first prototypes of solutions for their provocations and problem statements.

Finally, teams will showcase their learnings, share their prototypes and build an “AI-powered design portfolio”. By synthesizing across teams, we will identify and recognize unintended consequences, framing a bigger picture: What first and second order implications might surface and how to deal with them?

This Pop Out is open to Stanford students, Googlers (preferred Googlers in non-technical roles -- from sales to HR and others, in the spirit of democratizing the understanding of emerging tech) and other interested Industry Experts and Leaders who have previous basic experience (courses or equivalent) with design thinking.

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Teaching Team