BlueJourney for AI – A Study Beyond Design Thinking to Develop Artificial Intelligence Solutions

Abstract

BlueJourney is a program from ThinkLab Brazil, the innovation laboratory of IBM Research. BlueJourney was designed to connect customers, IBM researchers and other technical areas by using Design Thinking techniques. We have a specific space of immersion and co-creation and a team of professionals specialized in software development, business, engagement, design, ecosystem, education, marketing and content production. BlueJourney was created on 2018 to attend our clients’ transformation needs. We study their challenges, and with clients’ specialists, researchers and technical areas from IBM, we explore deeply their problems and opportunities to innovate. Therefore, we create viable solutions that truly meet people’s needs and expectations. In 2019, some clients brought the challenge to develop projects by using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sometimes because they knew exactly how AI could help their business and sometimes just because it’s a buzz word, it’s a movement that they don’t want to stay out. In all the cases, we run the BlueJourney program to find out viable solutions with AI. But as AI is already a theme of solution with technology, we had problems to seek a perfect way to do it. Design Thinking is a method to study problems and opportunities and to create solutions. So, it’s an assumption not starting with a predetermined technology. For these cases, when we need to discuss how to apply AI as a solution for some problems, we already have the technology determined. Also, for most of AI solution we need to have the data available to build the solution, that is not always the true in client reality. For these reasons, we decided to create a way to work with Design Thinking methodology when we have the premise to work with AI. In this paper, we will present a study about Design Thinking for AI. We will show how we simulated a challenge and developed the steps this method suggested, and all the conclusion about this process. We will also propose an approach about Design Thinking and AI based in the study.