Reflections
Beyond the individual machines, the workshop generated lively discussions about the opportunities and challenges of creating more transparent, explainable, and value-sensitive AI systems. Many of the concepts acknowledged that significant technological, ethical, and societal hurdles remain. Participants, for example, reflected on what future AI systems might look like and on the pathways and collective efforts required to realize them. A central takeaway from the workshop session was that designing AI technologies is also about designing human experiences, relationships, and futures. By materializing speculative futures through tangible artifacts, participants were able to critically examine AI's role in society and articulate the kinds of futures they would prefer to create.
References
Kristina Andersen and Ron Wakkary. 2019. The Magic Machine Workshops: Making Personal Design Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 112, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300342