User-Centred Design Actions for Lightweight Evaluation of an Interactive Machine Learning Toolkit

Machine learning offers great potential to developers and end users in the creative industries. For example, it can support new sensor-based interactions, procedural content generation and end-user product customisation. However, designing machine learning toolkits for adoption by creative developers is still a nascent effort. This work focuses on the application of user-centred design with creative end-user developers for informing the design of an interactive machine learning toolkit. We introduce a framework for user-centred design actions that we developed within the context of an EU innovation project, RAPID-MIX. We illustrate the application of the framework with two actions for lightweight formative evaluation of our toolkit—the JUCE Machine Learning Hackathon and the RAPID-MIX API workshop at eNTERFACE’17. We describe how we used these actions to uncover conceptual and technical limitations. We also discuss how these actions provided us with a better understanding of users, helped us to refine the scope of the design space, and informed improvements to the toolkit. We conclude with a reflection about the knowledge we obtained from applying user-centred design to creative technology, in the context of an innovation project in the creative industries.