"Research & Ai-insights" (Ai tools for Design Research)

Rather, let AI make it all.

There's a race of who's the one that's going to take the most advantage of this technology, Ai has come to revolutionize the world and all industries, this is no difference for the design and 3D modeling industry.

As a design professional, I'm always keen to explore upcoming technologies and processes, this is my approach on understanding AI tools to aid on industrial design activities.

This story it's part of a series where i explore AI tools for the different stages of design, you can read the introductions and follow the series here:

My first approach with AI tools, specifically LLM's was on research, as AI has access to basically the whole web, it's efficient on finding good knowledge, sources of inspirations, patent lookup.

Here i can only recommend NotebookLM by Google it's design it's specifically tailored for research activities, you can give it as many documents for source, it can automatically look for sources, then it would generate mind maps that you can explore, conversations explaining concepts, videos, diagrams and all source of outputs to understand any given subject, however, a full context AI chat should work fine like Claude, Grok or ChatGPT, each have their own style to response and are more prone to hallucinations (although everyday less common). NotebookLM sticks mostly with your sources and gets less wild with the information that gives you

How i used NotebookLM?

On an effort to design a better mounting system for climbing holds, I used NotebookLM to understand Climbing Holds and their mounting systems ...

On the image:
Sources Block (left): These are multiple files and links as the source of information, NotebookLM was able to find sources based on search prompts as well as some files and links that I've given.

Chat Block (middle): Here's the common AI chat where we can ask questions, AI will try it's best to answer using mainly the given sources plus what it can access over the internet.

Studio Block (right): Here I'm showing a Mind Map of concepts created based on a given prompt: "different climbing hold types and their mounting systems". NotebookLM was able to identify concepts and break them down for me.

With this AI tool, i was able to understand the concepts, identify all the systems and patents, gather requirements like holding force, sizes, common materials, etc.

What i can NOT get from Ai it's the Users Experience, for a complete research, talking with route setters (they mount the climbing holds and setup climbing routes) and climbers it's critical to understand specifics of their context and user stories, going to the climbing gym and watch them work, you might notice things that no one has named yet, specific situations derived by local culture or access to resources and tools that would totally change the way they work.

Can Ai do Research & Insights?

Sort of, you can get lots of data and understand documented theory, but it wont give you the insight you could get when for example talking with a focus group or doing user stories based on real user activities.

It's easy to get lost on theory but we should always consider the users and it's relevant context.

Amazing!:

• Gather documentation
• Understand Concepts
• Define Requirements
• State of the Art of a given technology

Nope (yet?):

• User experiences
• Field research
• Finding unnamed problems/opportunities
• Understanding situations on specific contexts