| Reflection is one of the key steps in generating creative design solutions.Enhancing the individual designer’s ability to reflect on design actions is important,not only to effectively support individual innovation,but also as an integrated driver of team innovation.However,the individual designer’s design reflection process is often limited by a lack of interactivity and it is therefore necessary to add an interactive entity to compensate for the lack of reflective conditions.With their dialogic,multi-sensory and anthropomorphic interactive properties,voice assistants are expected to act as interactive entities and become a medium for individual designers to activate their design reflection ability.A review of domestic and international research reveals that,although academics have already paid early attention to the potential of voice assistants for creativity enhancement,there is still no exploration of the need for reflective interaction in personal design scenarios and a lack of clear directions and perspectives on how voice assistants can contribute to the enhancement of reflection ability.Against this background,this thesis investigates the design of voice assistants to activate reflection,using "reflection in action" as a theoretical tool to develop the "Xiaozhi" voice assistant and to validate its usefulness in real design scenarios.Firstly,in Chapter 2,this thesis examines the theoretical foundations related to reflection and voice assistants.It clarifies the concept and definition of reflection,summarises the process of reflection,the necessary conditions for it to occur and the methods of facilitating it,and argues for the possibility and advantages of voice assistants,and does research on the design methods of voice assistants for this advantage,gaining knowledge about the design content,design ideas and implementation methods of voice assistants.In Chapter 3,this thesis conducts interview research and protocol analysis to extract the reflective patterns and needs of individual designers in relation to their unique needs for reflection.In Chapter 4,the thesis explains the design process of the reflective voice assistant,implements a usable prototype of the reflective voice assistant,and conducts usability testing and design iterations.In Chapter 5,the thesis evaluates the usefulness of the voice assistant for design reflection,setting up a before-and-after control test with the voice assistant as a variable,inviting experts to evaluate the creativity of all designs and conducting retrospective interviews with participants at the end of the experiment to understand their subjective evaluation of the assistant’s functionality and their perceptions of the voice features.In summary,this thesis focuses on the design methodology and validation of the effectiveness of a voice assistant geared towards activating reflection skills.The innovations of this thesis include:a design idea that combines reflection theory and voice assistant,a usable prototype of a voice assistant that aims at individual design reflection,and an evaluation of the application benefits of a reflective voice assistant prototype.The experiments show that the "Xiaozhi" voice assistant designed and implemented in this study is effective in enhancing the creativity of individual designers’ service design insights,and can help designers to promote convergence,refinement,direction shifting and goal definition.This study is an exploratory study in the field of voice assistant for design reflection,which can provide some ideas for the design of voice assistants in the professional field and provide some insights for the improvement of design reflection. |
