Artificial Experience (AX) Design: The Social Future of User Experience

Since the 1980s, user experience (UX) has been a critical, human-centric movement to improve the design and usability of technology. UX frameworks, such as Garrett’s Five Planes, prescribe considerations for the strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface of a screen-based interaction. However, recent advances in conversational AI are beginning to move us away from screens and such frameworks now fall short on two key elements of modern AI: semiotics and social. Semiotics, the meanings we derive from a broad set of signs, have expanded in the age of AI and robotics to include a collection of humanlike nonverbal cues. Social acknowledges that these humanlike technologies are no longer lifeless tools, but have begun to occupy a new ontological space in our minds, somewhere between hammer and human. We need a discussion about these additional elements and how they contribute to the emerging idea of Artificial Experience (AX): the complex interactions we have and relationships we form with modern conversational AI and social robots. Our technologies have always been social by being extensions of ourselves. Modern AI is yet another social extension, however, it is unique in being the first generation of technologies to which we also assign such vast social agency. UX tells us how to design these technologies to be good tools, however, this is not enough for the age of AI. We need AX to show us how to design these technologies to be good collaborators.