In this workshop, participants will be introduced to how conversational AI, otherwise known as chatbots, are created and will be led through a design thinking sprint to collaboratively design a chatbot. Chatbots are a great way to search for information in a way that leverages natural conversations that we engage in during face to face human interaction. To many the conversational design and technical development of chatbots are a blackbox, as components such as machine learning and natural language processing can be intimidating to learn about. This workshop will help attending participants to empathise with the chatbot creation process and gain a basic understanding of the technology behind chatbots in a fun, introductory and collaborative way.

In the workshop, facilitators will lead a design thinking sprint, where participants will be given a task to create a chatbot to be used during a Covid related scenario. Participants will be encouraged to empathise with users, ideate conversations and present their conversation set to the group. Afterwards, using Google’s Dialog Flow, facilitators will collate and combine the conversation sets from the groups to create a single gender neutral chatbot. The chatbot will be made available on a publicly accessible web page, and will be sent to participants 2-3 days after the conference. Participants will be asked to provide feedback on the workshop and the co-creation of their chatbot post event.

Indra McKie is a 2nd year PhD student/casual academic/research assistant/ex-librarian/AI designer from the School of Communication, UTS. Her interdisciplinary PhD study uses situ naturalistic observations of human-device interactions to investigate the relationship between conversational AI across four diverse case studies: an autoethnography, children, long-term users and seniors.

Bhuva Narayan is the Graduate Research Coordinator for the School of Communication at UTS. Dr. Narayan teaches Design Thinking and also Qualitative Research Methods. Her research encompasses Information Science, HCI, Digital Social Media, Social Informatics, Social Justice, and Human Learning.

Baki Kocaballi is a lecturer at the School of Computer Science, UTS. His research is located at the intersection of interaction design, AI, and digital health and wellbeing with a focus on multimodal and conversational technologies. He is interested in employing situated and generative design approaches to understand and re-imagine human-AI relationships.

Edward Luca is a library practitioner and researcher. He is currently Manager of Academic Services (Medicine and Health) at the University of Sydney Library. Edward writes and speaks on topics including scholarly publishing, design thinking, and academic librarianship.