When writing students design AI chatbots: Integrating design thinking as a critical AI literacy practice

This study examines how design thinking (DT) can function as a conceptual and analytical framework for supporting students’ critical AI literacy practices in writing and technical communication classrooms. Drawing on focus group interviews, individual reflection essays, and design artifacts from undergraduate technical writing students who collaboratively designed and customized AI chatbots using Poe, the study explores how students enacted responsible and user-centered design practices through each stage of the DT process. Findings reveal that 1) the empathize and define stages helped students identify algorithmic biases and frame inclusivity as part of user-centered design; 2) the ideate and prototype stages translated critical awareness into design decisions around prompt engineering, knowledge base curation, and visual accessibility; and 3) the test stage allowed students to revise their chatbot design through iterative usability testing and user feedback. Collectively, the DT process positioned students as human-in-the-loop co-creators who exercised rhetorical agency through prompt design, knowledge curation, and bias mitigation while designing customized chatbots. The article ends with pedagogical implications for integrating DT into critical AI pedagogy, chatbot design, and composition instruction.