The innovation landscape is drastically changing due to the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as whole industries are incorporating AI into smart products and automated processes. Designing AI for industry 4.0 requires revolutionary thinking. It requires the emergence of new design paradigms that build designers' ability to navigate the ethical and socioeconomic issues that AI brings in the future of work. This research develops RethinkAI™ a new participatory design method to address this gap. The paper focuses specifically on how to design the relationship of humans and AIs working together.
RethinkAI™ builds an interactive, social way for designers and transdisciplinary teams to explore this relationship. It creates insights on how human and AI strengths can be designed together in a co-evolving relationship in the future of work. RethinkAI™ was designed, tested and refined through a series of three workshops. The method was evaluated in a final workshop with 24 multinational industry professionals, involved in the decisions of integrating AI into their products and processes. The paper analyses the results from its application. It explores how this participatory method can be a valuable and rich medium to stimulate new thinking into the current design paradigms of humans and AI systems interaction. The analysis indicates that the use of human strengths and participatory method can help develop designers’ agency in surfacing and mitigating social and ethical issues when designing AI into products and services. The paper concludes with a reflection on current insights and direction of further research.

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