23 Ways to Make AI a True Design Partner
Every design and research team is experimenting with AI right now. But most of what’s happening is still ad hoc: individual experiments that never add up to a repeatable process. Teams are moving faster, but not always more confidently.
That’s why we created the AI-Supported Methods Playbook — a menu of 23 design and research methods from our own work that help you decide when to lead, when to delegate, and how to collaborate with AI. These guidelines are designed to help you build a more thoughtful, human-led process with AI, not just copy and paste prompts.
Each method includes:
- Practical steps for using AI across framing, discovery, synthesis, and concept development
- Prompts you can adapt for your own work
- Common pitfalls and quality checks to keep your insights credible
- Recommendations for tools to explore and compare
- Guidance on where to be careful to maintain human judgment
The playbook is drawn from our Maven course, AI for Strategic Research, where hundreds of designers and researchers have learned to integrate AI into their work with rigor and confidence.
Download the Playbook
The AI-Supported Methods Playbook is free to download and built for anyone working in research, design, or strategy who wants to use AI more intentionally.
👉 The AI-Supported Methods Playbook
