Unlocking Gen Z's Creative Future: Innovating AI Tools for Inspiration and Collaboration
When embarking on our journey to explore the potential of creative AI tools alongside a cohort of Gen Z individuals, their desires were crystal clear: they sought tools that could support their creative processes, reduce barriers to entry, and foster connections within creative communities.
During our interactions, a high-school senior expressed aspirations of potentially launching a business in the future. They envisioned utilizing AI to guide them through the creation of visuals or advertisements for their venture. This insight prompted us to delve deeper into what this entails practically. Consequently, we developed a suite of creative AI tools and enlisted individuals aged 13 to 24 to test them within their own creative endeavors and daily lives.
AI Creator vs. AI Collaborator
We constructed two distinct prototype experiences to gauge the spectrum of roles, capabilities, and personas that a creative AI could embody. On one end of the spectrum, we crafted an AI geared towards swift and efficient performance. Its interface prioritized optimized functionality to deliver the most suitable output in minimal time.
Conversely, we designed a hyper-collaborative creative companion aimed at aiding individuals in expressing their unique styles. This AI not only generated content but also provided inspiration, assisting Gen Z in discovering new styles, discerning trends, refining preferences, and gaining insight into their personal tastes.
Subsequently, we tailored our prototypes to align with the contextual needs of each participant's life.
Exploring the Values Underpinning Our Designs
Through the testing of our diverse prototypes, we discerned that no single AI creative tool could cater to the preferences of every individual across all scenarios. Gen Z encompasses a wide spectrum of values concerning their expectations from creative tools. While some prioritize speed and efficiency, others value immersive collaboration and personal expression, with these values fluctuating depending on the context.
For swift, day-to-day creative tasks, efficiency reigns supreme.
Many Gen Z members lead extraordinarily busy lives, juggling responsibilities ranging from managing multiple school group social media accounts to initiating and managing businesses while maintaining academic, familial, and social commitments. Consequently, there's often minimal time or energy available for extensive creative endeavors. As one college freshman articulated, "Social media doesn't feel meaningful to me; only the end goal does. So, I love that this AI can help me reach that end goal faster."
To cater to users with such preferences, the challenge lies in facilitating the attainment of a gratifying creative outcome swiftly and with minimal time investment. The gap between prompt and output should be minimized, with user experience offering visual templates and clear guidelines that expedite creation within predefined styles.
For creators, aspiring professionals, and artists, AI should function as a nuanced collaborator, providing tools for inspiration, personal expression, and enhanced creative control.
Conversely, other Gen Z members aspire to produce original and expressive work. As Cole, one of our Gen Z collaborators, expressed, "I think the ability to re-edit to make it have a more human touch and connection makes it a good tool. I want a good combination of AI and humans—in graphic design at least."
For individuals valuing craftsmanship and personal expression, the gap between prompt and output necessitates elongation. Future collaborative AI interfaces must accommodate multiple feedback rounds, provide ample opportunities for human input, and be capable of processing diverse input modalities—such as reference images, sketches, font files, CAD files, among others.
These collaborative AI experiences should still empower users to create and customize manually. The challenge here lies not in supplanting human craftsmanship and creativity but in designing interfaces that enable AI to enhance our creativity, delivering nuanced output that aligns with the rich personal expression sought by Gen Z, while also offering tools for users to infuse their unique touch manually.
An AI-Enabled Creative Future So, what implications does this hold for the future of AI?
AI experiences must continually strive to discern user intent and comprehend varying definitions of 'good' across different scenarios—does a user require a swift solution or a creative companion? As a guiding principle, designers should offer diverse options regarding the tone, role, capabilities, and suggestions of their AI to users, dedicating efforts to consistently listen, discover, and elevate the most relevant options for their audience.
Creativity represents merely one domain where we are actively listening, discovering, and experimenting with the prototyping of future AI experiences. We are also exploring how AI should manifest in education, mental health, employment, social media, and beyond. Stay tuned for our forthcoming installment, delving into Gen Z's perspectives on AI personal assistants entering group dynamics.
Portions of the imagery in this article were generated or modified using generative AI.
Thank you Matt Callahan
Matt is a Senior Design Lead at the Play Lab where he works as an Industrial Designer and Design Researcher. He is passionate about designing experiences that spark joy and believes a playful approach to design is the best way to unlock creative solutions to tough problems.