Designing for Democratization: Introducing Novices to Artificial Intelligence Via Maker Kits
This work addresses the problem of making AI accessible to non-technical users, though it is incremental in applying existing maker kit principles to AI.
The paper tackled the challenge of democratizing artificial intelligence for novice users by designing TJBot, an open-source cardboard robot kit that uses pre-built AI services, and found that it successfully attracted novices, with 40% of forkers being new to GitHub and diverse demographics engaging in prototyping.
Existing research highlight the myriad of benefits realized when technology is sufficiently democratized and made accessible to non-technical or novice users. However, democratizing complex technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) remains hard. In this work, we draw on theoretical underpinnings from the democratization of innovation, in exploring the design of maker kits that help introduce novice users to complex technologies. We report on our work designing TJBot: an open source cardboard robot that can be programmed using pre-built AI services. We highlight principles we adopted in this process (approachable design, simplicity, extensibility and accessibility), insights we learned from showing the kit at workshops (66 participants) and how users interacted with the project on GitHub over a 12-month period (Nov 2016 - Nov 2017). We find that the project succeeds in attracting novice users (40% of users who forked the project are new to GitHub) and a variety of demographics are interested in prototyping use cases such as home automation, task delegation, teaching and learning.