An Exploratory Study on How AI Awareness Impacts Human-AI Design Collaboration

TL;DR

This study investigates how AI awareness influences human-AI collaborative design, demonstrating that AI awareness improves communication fluidity and collaboration efficiency through a Wizard-of-Oz experiment.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of AI awareness in collaborative design and empirically explores its impact on communication and efficiency in human-AI teams.

Findings

AI awareness enhances communication fluidity

AI awareness improves collaboration efficiency

Design implications for future human-AI systems

Abstract

The collaborative design process is intrinsically complicated and dynamic, and researchers have long been exploring how to enhance efficiency in this process. As Artificial Intelligence technology evolves, it has been widely used as a design tool and exhibited the potential as a design collaborator. Nevertheless, problems concerning how designers should communicate with AI in collaborative design remain unsolved. To address this research gap, we referred to how designers communicate fluently in human-human design collaboration, and found awareness to be an important ability for facilitating communication by understanding their collaborators and current situation. However, previous research mainly studied and supported human awareness, the possible impact AI awareness would bring to the human-AI collaborative design process, and the way to realize AI awareness remain unknown. In this study, we explored how AI awareness will impact human-AI collaboration through a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. Both quantitative and qualitative results supported that enabling AI to have awareness can enhance the communication fluidity between human and AI, thus enhancing collaboration efficiency. We further discussed the results and concluded design implications for future human-AI collaborative design systems.