In the future, will we talk with virtual versions of deceased family members? How could teaching be enhanced by a robot teaching assistant? How could a transient student create a temporary smart home? Who will decide the values that guide the digital assistants that will be ubiquitous in our daily lives? How has popular culture both portrayed and shaped the field of artificial intelligence? These are a few of the questions explored in a new course developed by OpenGrounds at the intersection of design, technology, culture and real world challenges. Mike Ross, a computer science student observed, “I came into the class with the idea of artificial intelligence as the science fiction that we’ve all read about … A big design challenge of this class is that if we can use these intelligent systems, how do cities start to look? How do the interactions of a nation work? What is a reasonable failure rate? What does the design process look like now that these systems are starting to make autonomous decisions?”

During the 2017 January Term, OpenGrounds piloted a new form of immersive design experience for university students and faculty in a collaborative partnership with the nationally renowned, Charlottesville-based technology firm, WillowTree, Inc. The group explored the rise of artificial intelligence in the technologies that shape our daily lives, both in the virtual space of the Internet and in our homes and workplaces. Fourteen students from across the University, six UVA faculty members from five disciplines, and six creative leaders from WillowTree participated in workshops that mixed the development of design strategies, technical knowledge, and critical reasoning on the culture and ethics of emerging technologies. The workshops laid the groundwork for a design exercise to imagine how AI might shape our lives in the future.  The projects questioned the assumptions that go into the modeling of the human brain, imagined new functions that traditional interfaces could not achieve, and questioned the boundaries of our identities as human beings. OpenGrounds Director Bill Sherman noted that “we are in the midst of a technological revolution as big as the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. We need to be thinking about more than just what this technology can do. That’s why we need to build bridges between those innovating in fields like artificial intelligence and the artists and designers who ask what it could mean for our humanity.”