The development of an artificial intelligence assistant for participatory design in the engineering design educational environment

Participatory design (PD) is a method that focuses on the nature of collaboration, enabling users to participate actively in the design process and assess the feasibility of the design and give feedback. The characteristics make it suitable for application in the field of education, to train students to explore the user’s needs for products and participate in the solution of the problem. However, applying PD in the educational environment is not easy because it is difficult to find product users to participate in the teaching process throughout the school. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design, construct, and develop a smart voice assistant. It can act like a product user to have a smooth conversation with students. The intelligent voice assistant will give feedback to students. This study has analyzed the dialogue between users and designers by the past PD research and found out the intention in the process of dialogue based on the engineering design process. And based on these intentions, the experience in the use of products, product requirements, unmet, and other information was collected into the database. The developed intelligent voice assistant can partially replace the real user in the PD. An experiment will be conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the developed intelligent voice assistant.