AI as co-design partner

Co-design, or participatory design is an approach to design which focuses on processes and procedures of design. It has been used in many settings and at various scales. Rooted in work with trade unions in the Nordic countries, this approach has also a political dimension of user empowerment and democratisation. From this persepctive, co-design requires the end user's participation: not only in decision making but also in idea generation. Moreover, it is argued that designers create more innovative ideas and concepts when working within a co-design environment with others than they do when creating ideas on their own. Interestingly, AI has now entered co-design environments through large language models, LLMs, such as chatbots, which are a type of artificial intelligence algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and masive data sets to understand, summarise, generate and predict new content. LLMs, then, are able to process vast amounts of text data, mostly harvested from the Internet providing a basis to generate and communicate new ideas and concepts. Moreover, LLMs use natural language to simulate human conversation.The model, then, as a conversational chatbot becomes effectively a co-design partner.