Application of ChatGPT in Design Thinking

ChatGPT from OpenAI belongs to the most-hyped advancements of artificial intelligence in research and practice. Both disciplines agree that AI applications like ChatGPT will change the way how business is done. Due to its enormous capabilities, it can effectively support the work of any discipline and augment the human worker’s capabilities: It is able to mimic human conversations, write and debug computer programs, write essays, and solve complex tasks. However, despite these game-changing capabilities, the question of whether AI cannot only mimic or augment human capabilities but have its own creativity remains. Especially recent AI applications have limited capabilities when it comes to emotions and human-centered insights. However, this is crucial to develop novel and creative solutions for people, as it is the aim of design thinking. Both human-centered and emotional insights into people are central to the success of the results of the design thinking process. At the same time, these insights are potential limitations of recent AI applications. For this reason, we decided to combine design thinking with ChatGPT and formulated the following research question: How can AI be used in the design thinking process? To answer this research question, we organized a design thinking workshop and asked the participants to use ChatGPT in the entire design thinking process that consists of the phases of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. All relevant problem-solving tasks were executed by the chatbot. The participant’s only task was to fix ChatGPT’s output on post-its and arrange them as it is commonly done when humans do design thinking. Summing up, this article contributes to the literature as follows: First, we provide novel insights into the application of ChatGPT as one of the most consumer-used AI technologies. We show how ChatGPT can be used in combination with this well-known creativity technique and share our experience from our workshop. Second, we link the capability of ChatGPT with the requirements of design thinking and provide sample tasks for the chatbot that can be used in academia and practice. Third, we provide insights into the strengths and limitations of ChatGPT in creative problem-solving.