– Co-imagining mutual learning of AI technologies and designing with AI tools
Guest Editors
- Susanne Stigberg, Østfold University College, Norway
- Klaudia Carcani, Østfold University College, Norway
- Suhas Govind Joshi, University of Oslo, Norway
- Tone Bratteteig, University of Oslo, Norway
Important dates
- Deadline: September 10th, 2025
- Notification to the authors: October 30th, 2025
- Camera ready paper: January 10th, 2026
- Publication of the special issue: Spring 2026 (tentatively)
Overview
Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) make Participatory Design (PD) obsolete? AI systems are deployed rapidly across domains of considerable social significance—in healthcare, education, employment, criminal justice, and many others—without appropriate safeguards or accountability structures in place [1]. At the same time, there is a growing interest in using participatory approaches for the design, development, and evaluation of AI systems across industries, academia and the public sector. Researchers have started to explore different aspects of AI tools for co-creation in PD [7], [11] and different co-creation processes for the design of AI-based solutions [3], [6], [9]. In this special issue, we aim to collect and share explorations with and about AI in PD to create a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities for co-designing future ethical, responsible, and explainable AI solutions.
Early PD projects were motivated by the introduction of computer technologies into industrial workplaces, where they threatened to impoverish or take over jobs. Just like computers were a threat to work and workers in the 1970s and 80s, AI seems to be a threat to workers—and societies—today. This is an argument for using a PD approach aimed at understanding the technology and its potential for changing workplaces and work practices, as well as to open up for workers to have a say in choices concerning the technology during its design and use [8]. We see two different combinations of AI and PD: a) the use of AI tools in PD for design inspiration [4] or co-ideation [5], and b) using PD activities to collaboratively envision digital futures with AI [11], [10]. Can PD help to understand AI and its potential for changing our lives? Bratteteig and Verne [2] argue that PD is well suited for users and designers working together to negotiate and mitigate the challenges AI poses to our digitalized societies. However, they argue that PD researchers need to navigate through three challenges: understanding AI technology, evaluating AI solutions, and distinguishing between “normal use” and training of AI services. Voinov and Bousquet [12] propose participatory modeling as a purposeful learning process for action that engages the implicit and explicit knowledge of stakeholders to create formalized and shared representation(s) of reality.
As a step towards broadening the discussion about AI and PD, our proposal seeks to extend a warm invitation to researchers and professionals worldwide who are exploring the intersection of PD and AI, including both aspects of mutual learning and co-designing. This special issue is also an extension of a workshop that took place at NORDICHI 2024. The purpose of this special issue, therefore, in addition to collecting contributions from those who participated in the workshop, is to broaden the discussion to include scholars and practitioners who are engaged in the discourse about AI and PD and who would like to contribute with and share their own visions.
References:
1. Aleks Berditchevskaia. Participatory AI for humanitarian innovation.
2. Tone Bratteteig and Guri Verne. 2018. Does AI make PD obsolete? exploring challenges from artificial intelligence to participatory design. In Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Situated Actions, Workshops and Tutorial – Volume 2 (PDC ’18), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3210604.3210646
3. Amanda Buddemeyer, Jennifer Nwogu, Jaemarie Solyst, Erin Walker, Tara Nkrumah, Amy Ogan, Leshell Hatley, and Angela Stewart. 2022. Unwritten Magic: Participatory Design of AI Dialogue to Empower Marginalized Voices. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’22), 366–372. https://doi.org/10.1145/3524458.3547119
4. Alice Cai, Steven R Rick, Jennifer L Heyman, Yanxia Zhang, Alexandre Filipowicz, Matthew Hong, Matt Klenk, and Thomas Malone. 2023. DesignAID: Using Generative AI and Semantic Diversity for Design Inspiration. In Proceedings of The ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI ’23), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3582269.3615596
5. Li-Yuan Chiou, Peng-Kai Hung, Rung-Huei Liang, and Chun-Teng Wang. 2023. Designing with AI: An Exploration of Co-Ideation with Image Generators. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’23), 1941–1954. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596001
6. Morena Danieli, Tommaso Ciulli, Seyed Mahed Mousavi, and Giuseppe Riccardi. 2021. A Conversational Artificial Intelligence Agent for a Mental Health Care App: Evaluation Study of Its Participatory Design. JMIR formative research 5, 12: e30053. https://doi.org/10.2196/30053
7. Sabine Freese. 2023. AI in Co-Creation : The usability and impact of AI tools for co- creation in participatory design to generate innovative and user- centric design solutions. Retrieved November 9, 2023 from https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-52038
8. Joan Greenbaum and Finn Kensing. 2012. Heritage: having a say. In Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. Routledge, 41–56.
9. Jeonghyun Lee, Vrinda Nandan, Harshvardhan Sikka, Spencer Rugaber, and Ashok Goel. 2023. Designing a Communication Bridge between Communities: Participatory Design for a Question-Answering AI Agent. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.00813
10. Michael Muller and Q Vera Liao. 2017. Exploring AI Ethics and Values through Participatory Design Fictions. Human Computer Interaction Consortium.
11. Victoria Popova. 2023. Co-creating Futures for Integrating Generative AI into the Designers’ Workflow. Retrieved March 21, 2024 from https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-343453
12. Alexey Voinov and Francois Bousquet. 2010. Modelling with stakeholders. Environmental Modelling & Software 25, 11: 1268–1281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2010.03.007
Topics of Interest
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Perspectives on co-designing future ethical, responsible, and explainable AI solutions.
• Learning practices and strategies for understanding AI.
• Challenges facing PD for designing AI solutions
• Lessons learned from facilitated participatory activities AI tools.
• Combinations of the above.
Submission procedure
All submissions must be original and may not be under review by another publication.
The manuscripts should be submitted anonymized either in .doc or in .pdf format.
All papers will be blindly peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. Prospective participants are invited to submit an 8-20 pages paper (including authors’ information, abstract, all tables, figures, references, etc.).
The paper should be written according to the IxD&A authors’ guidelines .
Submission page -> link
(when submitting the paper please choose the section: ‘SI: Participatory Design meets Artificial Intelligence‘)
For scientific advice and for any query please contact the guest editors:
• susanne [dot] k [dot] stigberg [at] hiof [dot] no
• klaudia [dot] carcani [at] hiof [dot] no
• joshi [at] ifi [dot] uio [dot] no
• tone [at] ifi [dot] uio [dot] no
marking the subject as: IxD&A special issue on ‘Participatory Design meets Artificial Intelligence’‘.