Completing Our Innovate UK Funded Project
Over recent months, we have been working on something significant: an Innovate UK–funded project to enhance the Design Compass through the meaningful integration of AI.
The project has now reached its conclusion, marking an important milestone and a major step forward in the evolution of the platform.
This was never about adding AI for the sake of it. It was about embedding intelligence in a way that reduces guesswork, strengthens critical thinking, and supports viable, ethical and responsible design from the earliest stages.
Purpose-Built AI
Through the implementation of our AI system, Design Compass now delivers:
- AI chat focused on design and development -providing detailed, on-topic answers even when users are unsure of the right questions to ask.
- Constructive challenges -our AI is not sycophantic. It is sympathetic, but it will not hesitate to outline risks, highlight trade-offs and surface blind spots by analysing user inputs.
- Ethical and verified insights -trained on our curated knowledge base to ensure relevance and responsibility.
- Optimised performance -powered by multiple LLM systems with the ability to switch between them, ensuring the most appropriate response for each task.
- Private by design -unlike many AI-powered platforms, we do not use your conversations as training data, nor do we have access to them.
- Sustainability-focused -we prioritise the most eco-friendly technology available and provide an approximation of AI energy use and carbon emissions during interaction, keeping environmental impact visible through our Carbon Footprint Tracker.
The result is not just automation, but structured, intelligent support for design decision-making.
“Overall, an innovative way of building AI into a tool to help innovators develop new and sustainable ideas and products. This product has a huge amount of potential. Additional benefits have been integrated, such as helping understand, and reduce, the AI environmental impact through using AI.”
-Innovate feedback
This feedback reinforces our goal: to build an AI system that is not only powerful, but responsible, transparent and aligned with real-world design challenges.
Built Through Testing
A significant part of the project involved testing the enhanced platform with university students.
Their feedback directly informed:
- A redesigned user interface
- Clear demo walkthroughs for each feature
- Further development of the integrated Carbon Footprint Tracker
Because of their involvement, the platform is clearer, more intuitive and more robust.
We extend our thanks to the students who tested and challenged the system, to our team at Bang Creations for delivering the technical integration and helping bring the platform together, and to the universities we are currently in discussion with.
The funded phase may have ended, but the enhanced platform it enabled is only just beginning.
Watch this space for the launch of the new Design Compass tool.
If you would like early access before we go live, please contact us.
