CS-E4900 - User-Centered Methods for Product and Service Design D, Lecture, 2.9.2024-4.12.2024
Översikt
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Why are we writing an essay?
The aim of writing the essay is to get you familiar with the theory of existing user-centered methods for user research, product and service design. Although, the essay is not based on writing summaries of given references, it is rather a tool for constructing your own understanding of them, their potentials and lackings, feasibility and so on. You are highly encouraged to reconsider the methods you learn, in the context of your previous experiences, either professional or ordinary ones. Having your own understanding would help you in the upcoming team work, as you get to apply some of the methods you got familiar with while writing your essay. Therefore, submitting an essay is compulsory to be able to proceed with the course's team work. It also helps teams with students from different backgrounds, especially by the level of experience, to have a common starting point. Moreover, it ensures going further with only the students who are willing to put the effort into the essay and thus, creating a hopefully more fair atmosphere within the teams.
Why are we not writing an essay with ChatGPT or other generative AI tools?
The aim of writing the essay is to get you familiar with the theory of existing user-centered methods for user research, product and service design. This requires you to read and reflect the selected seminal works of UCD.
Besides this, current AI tools based on Large Language Models such as ChatGPT have quite a few inherent flaws:
- It is unknown what data has been used to train the models.
Originally most of them were trained on Internet Open Crawl data sets
and most academic and trade articles and books are not included.
- AI Tools claim to access the internet and user given data based on fair use, but this is debatable. They thus may produce illegal results
based on stolen IPRs. Several content producers (New York Times for
instance) have banned using their contents to train AI systems. Also be
reminded that you do not have permission to forward this course's
reading materials or written essays to a third party service without
their publishers' explicit consent. Which you do not have.
- Generative AI tools
cannot guarantee the accuracy of their output. While the produced text
may sound fluent and imitate logical though, it is only based on
statistical probabilities of words following each other in a block of
text. AIs commonly invent facts and references when they feel they look
good in a certain part of their output. For AI, facts are nothing, image
is everything.
- Our essay is an academic writing assignment (similar to your bachelor's thesis) and you are solely responsible for the accuracy and legality of it.
Guidance for the use of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning at Aalto University
Writing a Good Essay
Writing a good essay based on scientific material can be learned:
- Start by reading the material and making notes (in your own words) of the general ideas stated by the material. Note specific information that might be of interest later.
- Plan the structure of your essay before writing it. Think about how you can combine the ideas presented in the material related to the topic of the essay into a coherent text that has a beginning, a middle and an end.
- Make a synthesis of the material and include your own thoughts. Do not just summarise the material one after another.
- Write in your own words (referencing properly to cite the source of information).
For example, take a look at the following website for more detailed information:
Referencing properly
- Comply with the chosen template. Taylor&Francis HCI Commentary. Their referencing is almost 100% APA style.
- For more information: Neville, Colin. Complete Guide to Referencing and Avoiding Plagiarism (2nd Edition). Maidenhead, GBR: Open University Press, 2010.
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Essay Peer-Review Workshop
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Peer-Review Rebuttal Inlämningsuppgift
- It is unknown what data has been used to train the models.
Originally most of them were trained on Internet Open Crawl data sets
and most academic and trade articles and books are not included.