Episode 140 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with design leader and advisor Emily Campbell. Like me, Emily is deeply interested in AI. She’s developing Shape of AI, an emergent pattern language for AI. That was the subject of our conversation.

Shape of AI seeks to articulate patterns for interactions with AI-powered systems. The idea is helping users develop clearer mental models of the system to better understand what’s going on beneath the surface.

The project organizes patterns in five categories:

  • Identifiers help users recognize where AI is present.
  • Wayfinders guide users to valuable information.
  • Prompts help shape user inputs for better interactions.
  • Tuners teach users how to refine interactions for desired outcomes.
  • Trust indicators help users evaluate reliability.

Given how new this all is, the patterns are emergent and dynamic. But it’s important that they exist. Increasing transparency will demystify the technology and help users be more effective agents when interacting with AI-powered systems. Emily put it nicely:

if we are going to build a society, a platform, an ecosystem where everybody can be an agent, can be involved — users, customers, builders, whomever — we have to make sure that they have a common understanding of this so that they can affect this. If you don’t know how to describe something, it’s difficult to describe how to change it. If you don’t know what happens when you do something, it’s hard to ask for a different outcome. And so, by creating maybe not my particular language, but a language, a standard of thinking about interacting with this data, we can give people the tools to make that interaction better, to make it safer, to protect their interests within it, and to have more autonomy to keep humans in control and not these gigantic tech companies and their algorithms. And I think that’s the most critical thing that I hope comes out of this moment. Even if we stop putting AI sparkles on every product we ship.

This was one of my favorite recent conversations on The Informed Life. Its subject is of critical importance to anyone working on interaction design today.

The Informed Life episode 140: Emily Campbell on The Shape of AI