Preferable AI Futures: a Speculative Design Workshop
What do you feel when thinking about the future of AI? Curiosity? Hope? Fear? This workshop by Erik Peters, Karolina Thakker, and Nadia Piet aims to explore the anxieties and prejudices we have around this technology. Instead of imagining the easy-coming-to-mind dystopia, we use SDGs as a compass to help us navigate towards preferable AI futures.
What do you feel when thinking about the future of artificial intelligence technologies? Curiosity? Hope? Angst? With the current tempo of change, many may experience being lost and confused. Luckily, tomorrow has not happened yet, so we all have a way of influencing it.
Join us for the workshop session to imagine how we can achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with AI technologies. In the ‘Preferable AI Futures’ workshop, we use the futures thinking methodology to imagine positive AI narratives for the days to come. In a 2 hour online session, we take you on a healing journey across the spectrum of possible futures to narrow down to those that could bring a hopeful change. In these explorations, we use SDGs as moral guidelines that help us find ideas for AI products and services that could make these forecasts come true.
The results of the workshop are prototypes, the hopeful artefacts of the positive change that we want to see in the world. This workshop aims to explore the anxieties and prejudices we have around this technology and, instead of imagining the easy-coming-to-mind dystopia, focus our gaze on preferable AI futures.
The event is part of an ongoing collaboration between AIxDesign and Speculative Futures Rotterdam.
Nadia Piet / Karolina Thakker / Erik Peters
Erik Peters is a multidisciplinary artist and designer combining graphic and spatial design with investigative (design) research and speculative storytelling. He creates scenarios, publications and artefacts which explore possible futures in its plurality. Through queering ecology and technology he examines more-than-human perspectives within an ecosystem of interdependencies.
Karolina is a multidisciplinary designer and illustrator with a background in Industrial Design Engineering and a passion for futures thinking and speculative design. She uses a combination of storytelling, research and imagination to inspire the out-of-box solutions to current challenges. It’s her mission to help innovation-driven companies to succeed by supporting their design process along the way. Besides her freelance works, Karolina is also a chapter leader and organizer for the Speculative Futures Rotterdam community.
Nadia Piet is a designer & researcher focussed on AI/ML, data, and (digital) culture. Her work seeks to challenge how we design, relate to, and interact with technology. Currently, she’s building the AIxDesign collective, pursuing an MA in Data-Driven Design, learning to write Python, and working on freelance and creative projects. Prior, she worked as a design researcher for emerging technologies, educator for data and digital literacy, and had the opportunity to live and work from 10 countries across the globe.