Category: Ethics Through Design – Workshops

  • Worst, Most, Uncertainty: Exploring creative methods to uncover unspoken in AI ethics challenges

    Worst, Most, Uncertainty: Exploring creative methods to uncover unspoken in AI ethics challenges

    Dr Katrina Petersen is a Research Manager at Trilateral Research

    One challenge in designing AI comes from the work needed to align the wants of the users, the needs of society, the abilities of the tools, and the content of data themselves. These disconnects are often unspoken, yet regularly lead to unintended ethical impacts.

    For example, when designing AI intended to be used in decisions to help people the most, what happens if the AI looks for how to help the most people, but the user wants to know who needs help the most? This workshop starts from these disconnects, using uncertainty as a conceptual framing tool to explore how creative, hands-on, and participatory methods can help us see how ethical challenges like social injustices, uneven benefits, or unexpected responsibilities relate to the design and use of AI.

  • Experiments in Utopia as Method

    Experiments in Utopia as Method

    Transition Lab Workshops

    Viv Kuh, Responsible Innovation, University of Bristol

    Artist/Celebrant Bec Gee and Lecturer/Creative Futurist Viv Kuh have been working together on utopian futuring methodologies since 2022, supporting people to collectively imagine and critically engage with utopian futures as a means of reflecting on contemporary practice and values. Their work is inspired by Ruth Levitas’ (2013)Utopia as Method and was initially developed to support scientists and engineers to imagine the futures their research may create, but has since found resonance with researchers, artists, designerss and practitioners from a range of other contexts. 

    Vivienne Kuh and Bec Gee developed the Narrative Futuring method to help scientists and engineers “feel the futures” their research is helping to create. Using utopian envisioning as method, Narrative Futuring helps us imagine the people, places and emotions that may exist one day as a result of the pioneering technologies being developed right now.

    In this workshop, participants will learn about the Narrative Futuring method and use it to create some utopian visions for our plural futures with some of the emerging AI systems in the present day. Narrative Futuring is quick, dirty and iterative, enabling practitioners to swiftly generate multiple possible futures within which we can all play and explore, anticipating the joys and perils in the imaginaries of our shared techno-moral futures.