Description of the Workshop 

There has been an increasing interest in discussing implications of AI technologies in terms of ethics and sustainability. This workshop brings such questions into focus by exploring questions of ethics and sustainability through the use of Fictional News Articles. We use Fictional News Articles to cast forward 15 years to 2038 to imagine the future trajectories of AI, and reflect on how we got there. By writing Fictional News Articles – articles of events that are yet to take place and to be written – we will unpick critical tensions in the advancement of AI over the next decades. The workshop invites participants to develop perspectives and sensitivities on the futures of AI-enabled society and to critically reflect on the assumptions, methods, and tools for enabling (and disabling) such futures, with a particular focus on questions of ethics and sustainability. 

Keywords 

Knowledge, design fiction, fictional news articles, ethics, sustainability

Call for Participation 

Prospective workshop participants will each submit a workshop application. Applications should meet the following requirements:

• Application should contain motivation for participating in the workshop, potential ideas they would like to explore in speculative news articles, affiliation, name, and email address.
• PDF file formatted to one A4 page. Potential references may exceed this page amount, but the application text should be maximum one page. 
• Submitted via this form: (link)
• Participants are required to attend the workshop in person.

Preliminary Important Dates

• Submissions due: August 31, 2023
• Acceptance notification: September 12, 2023
• Workshop: November 14, 2023

Note: Selected fictional news articles may be published in papers resulting from the workshops. By signing up and applying to the workshop, participants agree that the data produced during the workshop may be used to inform a future publication on the Speculative News Articles Method.

Organizers (and Organizing Committee) 

Petra Jääskeläinen, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Anna-Kaisa Kaila, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
André Holzapfel, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Camilo Sanchez, Aalto University, Finland