Centre for Creativity enabled by AI unveils Design Sparks
New app for designers has been developed to give people the power to be creative
The Centre for Creativity enabled by AI (CebAI) at Bayes Business School has recently launched Design Sparks to help people find more creative solutions. The new app is aimed at user experience (UX), user interface (UI), product and service designers, as well as the stakeholders who work with them.
The web app uses a designer’s problem statement as the starting point, which can be pasted as a URL or uploaded as a PDF, and it can also be typed directly into the tool. Design Sparks integrates applied AI and established creative problem-solving techniques to respond to the problem statement with inventive directions, curated by CebAI’s design and creativity experts, unlike chatbots that simply scrape existing data from the internet.
The sparks generated by the tool help designers discover and consider innovative ideas in a fraction of the time it might take to research and brainstorm different perspectives alone.
Design Sparks encourages designers to direct their idea generation by making the app customisable to their needs. Users can click on topics extracted from their problem statement to focus the sparks, select a specific creativity method, and adjust the rarity and number of topics featured. The robot icon in the app will generate even more detailed ideas related to a spark if the user wants to drill down on a particular perspective.
The sparks can be bookmarked and remembered by the browser for next time, and the result is a web tool that anyone can use, quickly, to discover and generate ideas. This helps people to contribute to projects, prepare for and participate in workshops more effectively, and learn about creativity.
Moreover, the Design Sparks team are exploring how to specialise this AI-powered creative thinking in different sectors. Two of these sectors are the design of household appliances (with a global appliance manufacturer) and designing for circular economies (with a leading design agency) – to deliver creativity-on-demand to everyone.
Professor Neil Maiden, Director of CebAI, said:
“Design Sparks embodies much of what CebAI was set up to do – to make creative thinking and its outcomes accessible to anyone, especially people without training in creative thinking. As a consequence, we contribute to democratising design – enabling everyone to contribute more effectively to projects.”
Visit the Design Sparks website to find out more and access the app.