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NASA faced increasing complexity in managing data, meeting customer needs, and streamlining processes across its diverse missions and operations. With fragmented data sources, manual workflows, and a lack of integrated AI tools, teams struggled to maintain efficiency, consistency, and innovation.
Through a cross-organizational AI-readiness initiative led by the OCIO, NASA engaged stakeholders across Service Lines, Centers, and Mission Support Offices to identify challenges, articulate use cases, and prioritize AI opportunities. Workshops, assessments, and stakeholder collaboration provided a roadmap for integrating AI solutions, enabling secure data usage, and automating repetitive tasks. Focused efforts on training, governance, and iterative implementation ensured alignment with organizational goals.
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The Challenge
Users engaging with the AI shopping assistant often felt constrained by limited options, excessive follow-up questions, and a lack of personalization. These shortcomings led to user fatigue, misunderstandings, and a subpar shopping experience. Insights from user research (UXR) and transcripts revealed that users wanted more intuitive, human-like interactions that catered to their unique needs.
The Solution
A robust, adaptable framework was designed to transform AI conversations into sales-like consultations. By breaking user queries into three core components—use-case, constraints, and preferences—the framework enabled the bot to understand intent and deliver relevant, personalized results. Key enhancements included:
Allowing users to skip questions and navigate freely.
Providing contextual help for technical queries.
Transitioning to open-ended interactions after gathering essential details to prevent over-questioning.
Displaying diverse and curated results aligned with user preferences.
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Our team at Gazzetta, a media research lab, is tackling a fundamental challenge in journalism: the disconnect between media output and community needs, particularly in restricted or distorted information environments of autocracies. We have learnt over the past years that traditional audience research has led to quant-heavy, superficial understanding, ineffective content and, ultimately, irrelevance.
To address this problem, we have developed a three-stage process using AI knowledge bases to build empathy, map information needs, and analyze information flows. We have used this process to systematically review multiple information sources to build deep community understanding before product development.
This methodology has helped us preserve nuance, identify knowledge gaps, and assign confidence levels to findings. Rather than treating AI as a black box solution, a thoughtful process-oriented approach can help us better understand and serve information needs, and gradually rebuild relevance.
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We built a novel math tutoring app for 11-year-olds in the UK. Since this was our first AI project, we expected lots of technical issues. Those happened and on top of it, we ended up questioning the value of designers in AI-driven products.
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AI moves fast. In the time since we began programming DwAI25 in December, we’ve already seen important new developments like DeepSeek R1, Deep Research from OpenAI and Perplexity, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab. By June, the terrain will have transformed even further. In this panel, we’ll learn about the latest developments in AI from representatives from major AI players, and what they mean for UX professionals.
Wrap up
Cozy Juicy Real
Join us the evening of Tuesday, June 10 to play Cozy Juicy Real—an engaging online board game where the purpose is anything but trivial: creating authentic and truly meaningful connections with your peers.
Whether you’re looking to expand your network, meet your next client or connect with collaborators, this is your opportunity to make it happen.
You’ll experience Cozy Juicy Real, a simple, effective board game that’s been played in 71 countries. It’s proven to create stronger team bonds at the world’s most successful organizations – including Google, Adobe and the UN.
“You will connect. Cozy Juicy Real is the best way to foster connection online.”
– Marcia Goddard, Chief Culture Officer, The Contentment Foundation
“Feels Like Paper!” is a series of prototypes about augmenting physical paper through AI. Various ML models, LLMs and a mixed reality headset are used to infuse physical paper and ink with properties of the digital world without compromising on their physical traits.
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As a data visualization designer and developer the challenge I often face is what to do with unstructured data. One case study I can show is exploring survey results where the multiple-choice questions are straightforward to analyze but interesting open-ended questions like “What do your colleagues not understand about data visualization?” are much harder to crack.
Latent Scope is an open-source tool I built that streamlines a process of embedding text, mapping it to 2D, clustering the data points on the map and summarizing those clusters with an LLM. Once the process is done on a dataset structure emerges from the unstructured text, allowing us to get a sense of patterns in the survey answers. Themes like “the time it takes” to develop data visualization pop out, as do “the importance of good design.” While people don’t use the same language to describe these themes, they show up as clusters in the tool thanks to the power of embedding models.
https://github.com/enjalot/latent-scope
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We partnered with a non-profit to reduce opioid-related deaths by combining human expertise with AI-driven research, streamlining workflows, enhancing engagement through empathy-driven materials, and delivering actionable, high-impact insights for community-focused funding initiatives.
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Generative AI has helped a number of designers “think in code” for the first time but often hit a wall when trying to ship that code to production. Let’s talk about how we break down the wall.
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William Gibson famously claimed “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This is particularly true in the fast-moving world of AI, where practitioners in other disciplines are already wrangling with new issues that will soon impact design. This panel brings together an expert technologist, creator, and ethicist to discuss key AI developments and how these developments are impacting their work. From these three lenses, they’ll grapple with what this means for design over the next 12 months.