Artificial Intelligence is increasingly shaping children’s everyday lives, education, relationships, and future opportunities. As AI technologies become embedded across society, there is an urgent need to create spaces where children and young people are not only passive users of technology, but active participants in imagining and shaping alternative AI futures.
This half-day workshop brings together researchers, educators, designers, artists, and activists interested in participatory and democratic approaches to AI. Building on traditions from Participatory Design (PD), Child–Computer Interaction (CCI), and Computational Empowerment, the workshop explores how collaborative and creative design practices can support more inclusive, ethical, and sustainable relationships with AI.
The workshop invites participants to critically and creatively explore AI through intergenerational and participatory perspectives. Together, we will investigate how participatory methods can move beyond critique toward action, enabling children, communities, and researchers to collectively envision and enact alternative technological futures. Inspired by the concept of Enacting Utopias, the workshop will focus on practical and embodied approaches for imagining and materialising preferable AI futures.
We welcome contributions and participation from people working across HCI, PD, education, design research, AI literacy, arts-based methods, speculative design, activism, and community engagement. No prior experience working with children is required; we also encourage participation from those interested in developing this perspective in future work.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Participatory and co-design approaches to AI
Children’s computational empowerment and transformative agency
Critical and creative AI literacy
AI in education, community, and everyday contexts
Ethical and democratic approaches to AI design
Speculative, embodied, and future-oriented design methods
Participatory approaches to sustainable and inclusive AI futures
The workshop combines lightning talks, collaborative exploration, creative and embodied activities, and group discussions. Participants will collectively explore dilemmas emerging in AI-infused futures and experiment with participatory methods for imagining and prototyping alternatives.
We invite short contributions (approximately 800 words) in the form of papers, pictorials, provocations, design cases, or reflective pieces connected to the workshop themes. Accepted contributions will be shared among participants before the workshop to support discussion and collaboration.
Participants will also be invited to contribute to a planned special issue on Enacting Utopias through Participatory Design and may publish workshop contributions through the INTERACT publication series.
The workshop aims to create an open, inclusive, and collaborative environment that supports dialogue across disciplines, practices, and experiences. We look forward to collectively exploring how participatory design can help shape more just and democratic AI futures with and for children.