Learnings from my summer internship in New York.

Over summer 2019, I got the opportunity to intern in New York as a UX designer at Roomster, a platform that helps in finding great places & people to share a home with. The experience was nothing less than an invaluable crash course in design, systems thinking and workflow management. Working with a great set of people from design, engineering, marketing and management helped me learn and strengthen a lot of skills which would prove valuable in my journey. …

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the buzzword, but how does this affect us as designers? To understand and explore this further, I took “Advanced design for Artificial Intelligence” taught by Prof. Jennifer Sukis in the spring 2019 semester, and I have to say, the experience, learning, and the skillset gained would prove essential in my journey as a designer.

After being grouped with individuals from diverse backgrounds, our team decided to improve the experience of Urban Farming. We started our research to understand the domain, stakeholders, and pain points ( if any ). After conducting in-depth research, followed by intensive discussions…

Issues of bias and accessibility can crop anywhere unknowingly and can have severe consequences. The important thing to take into consideration is the fine distinction between preferences and bias. Although both might originate from upbringing, past experience, or lack of information, biases tend to be unfair in nature, and cause partiality and discrimination, while preferences are harmful and merely a liking of one state of things over the other.

In our topic “Agriculture Intelligence” dealing with urban farming, the domain of bias and accessibility is very limited. Few areas where they may arise can be regarding plant data that favor…

As a User Experience Research and Design professional, I imagine my role in an AI team to be focused on the holistic experience our product offers to it’s intended audience. Validating various aspects and need of an idea through research, and implementing that in a curated journey which engages the user would be my forte. My role would be focused more on the user side, rather than the technical aspects working behind the scenes.

Starting from a standard benchmark, AI would give us the capability to learn about the user over time, and personalize the product interactions better suited to…

“For the past 50+ years, AI’s progress was mainly limited by our inability to create faster computers, as well as coming up with a natural way for us to interact with them.” — Jennifer Sukis, Design Principle, IBM (AI Today, Medium).

When the alarm rang for the third time, Eric finally had to wake up to go to work. He was feeling lazier than usual today, but he tried never to miss work. He loved it too much. But he had not always been like this. Humanity had not always been like this. He could never forget the time when advancement of AI was at a boom, and humanity had been “jobless” for more than 30 years. At first it seemed a really good development, with humans indulging in whatever attracted their fancy. Food and shelter had become as common as…