AI techniques have been affecting people’s experiences with digital services, applications, interactions, and interfaces for a long while now, but without muchengagement with or input from interaction designers and HCI researchers.Over the past two years, as part of the AAAI Symposia series (2017–2018) [1],we have organized a gathering of researchers and practitioners from variousdisciplines to discuss the UX of AI & ML—the user experience of artificialintelligence and machine learning. Our main interest in organizing these events wasto discuss the HCI and design-practice implications of the current fascination withand adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning in user-facing products.@en

This article puts forward the notion of animistic design as an uncertainty-driven strategy to reimagine human–machine interaction as a milieu of human and nonhuman. Animistic design is suggested as capable of fostering affects, sensibilities and thoughts that capitalize on the uncertain, the unpredictable and the nonlinear, and their capacity to trigger creative pathways. Informed by post-human philosophies, theories of mediation and materiality, as well as by affect, agency and aesthesia, animistic design eschews the anthropomorphic and the cute playfulness often associated with animism. Instead, it proposes a practical–theoretical framework to articulate the nexus of digital innovation, interaction design practices, technical materialities and affective responses already emerging in the digital cohabitation of the human and the nonhuman. Using a ‘research through making’ approach, the article describes in detail a series of animistic design experiments and prototyping methods that explore ways of rethinking interaction as an open-ended and creative enterprise. Animistic design offers an investigative strategy that exploits degrees of collaboratively curated uncertainty and unpredictability to imagine forms of digital interaction, and to engender creative human–nonhuman relationships within a given digital milieu.@en

This paper explores the metaphor of animism as a methodological framework for interaction design and, in particular, advocates for a form of animism the authors term 'heterogeneous multiplicity.' Animism can make valuable contributions within ubiquitous computing contexts, where objects with designed behaviors tend to evoke a perception that they have autonomy, intention, personality and an inner life. Furthermore, animism that supports heterogeneous multiplicity offers unique opportunities to stimulate human creativity through embodied engagement with an ecology of things. To demonstrate the concept of heterogeneous multiplicity, the authors present a speculative design project, AniThings, that intertwines multiple animistic collaborators to position activities of digital resource discovery and curation beyond the narrow domain of recommendation engines and personal feeds. The project illustrates an ecology of six tangible, interactive objects that, respectively, draw from a variety of digital resources and inhabit a range of variously positioned stances towards their human collaborators and each other. This diversity of behaviors, resources, and positionality makes AniThings ideal for supporting open-ended ideation and collaborative imagining activities.@en

This article explores how prototyping and developing tools specifically for the design of AI can help advance the emerging field of UX/IxD for AI. Using the author's experimental Delft AI Toolkit as an example, we discuss several ways to think about the needs and features of an AI Toolkit.@en