(Un)making AI Magic: a Design Taxonomy
It addresses the need for design/HCI practitioners to understand and manipulate AI's perceived magic, though it is incremental in building on existing discourse.
The paper tackles the problem of how design influences perceptions of magic in AI by constructing a taxonomy from student projects, identifying seven principles that affect enchantment and disenchantment.
This paper examines the role that enchantment plays in the design of AI things by constructing a taxonomy of design approaches that increase or decrease the perception of magic and enchantment. We start from the design discourse surrounding recent developments in AI technologies, highlighting specific interaction qualities such as algorithmic uncertainties and errors and articulating relations to the rhetoric of magic and supernatural thinking. Through analyzing and reflecting upon 52 students' design projects from two editions of a Master course in design and AI, we identify seven design principles and unpack the effects of each in terms of enchantment and disenchantment. We conclude by articulating ways in which this taxonomy can be approached and appropriated by design/HCI practitioners, especially to support exploration and reflexivity.