Table of Contents
This is also a heading
This is a heading

MS PROJECT

PlayFutures

Designing Civic Futures with Kids using Puppets & Generative AI

Areas: Design Research, Child Computer Interaction, Performance Studies, Design Futuring, Civic Research
‍

Collaborators

Noura Howell, Michael Nitshche, Sumita Sharma, Ashley Frith, Jennifer Morrison

My Role

  • Design Researcher
  • Visual Design

Methods

  • Puppetry & Performance
  • Participatory Making
  • Thematic Analysis
  • Interviews

Tools

  • Puppet Making Kits
  • Art & Craft Supplies
  • Gen - AI Art

Timeline

  • Aug 2023 - March 2024

1. Overview

As Artifical Intelligence (AI) increasingly permeates our lives, it's crucial to understand how children, as future users and creators, engage with this technology. The PlayFutures project explores this intersection through a user-centered design approach, using puppetry as a lens to uncover insights into children's AI experiences. We analyse the findings through qualitative thematic analysis due to the exploratory nature of the method. Our findings highlight the ways in which perfomative and making future oriented methods were helpful for the kids to think critically on the use of AI.

2. Problem

Problems to current design/developments of future technologies include:

[1] Kozubaev et al (2020). Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring. 2020 CHI

Generative AI

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen - AI) has been in development with rapid pace in the past 2-3 years with advancement in the use and spread of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative Imaging and video models for major industries including education. There is a need for addressing the challenges that come with large scale AI adoption and especially with children. There is a call for efforts towards AI Literacy, Explainable AI and Critical Development of AI with its use amongst children.

Research Question

How can we design AI experiences that are engaging, empowering, and ethically sound for children? What role can puppetry play in understanding and shaping these experiences?

Additional Questions

  1. How might GenAI Art effect children's understanding and engagement with local civic issues in Atlanta?
  2. What insights can GenAI Art provide about hopes, fears, and priorities of Atlanta's youth on the future of their city?
  3. How do future scenarios of children with GenAI Art reflect current sociopolitical and environmental landscapes of Atlanta?
  4. How might GenAI Art effect intergenerational dialogue on future urban planning and community development in Atlanta?
  5. How can we co-create futures with generative-AI with kids?

3. Methodology

3.1 Design Futuring

Design futuring is a process of imagining future scenarios to inform design decisions and anticipate potential alternative realities in the future.

Needs in Design Futuring

Approaches to making design processes more inclusive include works from:

Dunne & Raby [1] discuss strategies for public engagement through critical and speculative design, emphasising the importance of collaboration with experts to add insight and validity to design propositions.

Howell et al. [2] argue that a plurality of perspectives is needed to engage imaginations that depict a diverse unfolding of potential futures.

Hyysalo et al [3] investigate the effectiveness of collaborative futuring with participants in generating valuable and significant information for planning purposes. This approach to futuring enables a more democratic engagement with the communities involved, which is beneficial from a normative perspective .

There is a need to accommodate multiple perspectives in designing products of the future. Inspiration for which can be taken from literature from areas of speculative, participatory, and inlcusive design:

To which the questions arise:

3.2 Artist - Designer Perspective

Gaver et al. [4] discuss looking at design research of new technologies from the creative traditional lens of an artist-designer, rather than a scientific or engineering perspective.

3.3 Critical Making

Ratto's perspective on critical making discusses the importance of engaging a materiality and the physical act of making in order to challenge and critique dominant modes of design and production [5].

3.4 Performance

Schechner's approach to performance studies highlights the importance of engaging with the embodied, experiential, and relational aspects of cultural practices, which can be applied to critical making and design futuring in order to create more engaging, inclusive, and impactful futures [6].

3.5 Crticality & Theatre

Ventä-Olkkonen et al [7] dicuss that critical design and making, along with the use of Theatre of the Oppressed, can be effective approaches for addressing the problem of bullying in collaboration with children.

One approach involves inviting children to critically consider future technology design for all and envision and design better AI/ML applications that are ethical, inclusive, and fair. Design futuring approaches are used to engage children in envisioning the future and designing inclusively [8]

3.6 Puppetry

The idea of puppets came up when we were discussing what mediums could work for exploring critical thinking. One of our collaborators had extensive experience in working with puppets previously. But, why puppets? Because:

4. Designing the Workshop

Playfutures

Playfutures is a workshop that is a workshop that enables kids to create puppets and perform with them to enact scenes from the future. The aim of the workshop is to encourage children to critically reflecton co-creation with AI and also novel technologies fo the future and how they can shape it.

Focus

  1. Kids age group 10-12
  2. Workshop in Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  3. Focus of local community issues.

Flow of the Workshop

Data Collection

Data collection methods included audio, video of the workshop and textual data through workbooks.

Workbook

The workbook was designed to provide a space for the kids to 1) fill their answers by taking their own time 2) provide a space to doodle while undergoing waiting periods 3) sketch any ideas or thoughts.

5.  Workshop DAy

7. Contibutions

Position Paper at a CHI 2024 Workshop  : PlayFutures: Imagining Civic Futures with AI and Puppets

a) Design Research

Performance as a design method has been analysed, this work would contribute to it and also as a way of looking at performance to design futures. It is an investigation into how performance studies, play, theatre and performing arts can be a bridge between a certain user group and doing participatory interventions with them.

b) Designing for Kids

c)  Design of Future Tech

As a design research method, this looks to investigates the design research done for creation of digital media of the future.

‍

The research directly contributes to existing work on Child Computer Interactions (CCI) and Critical AI Literacy with Children.

8. References

[1] Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.

[2] Noura Howell, Britta F. Schulte, Amy Twigger Holroyd, Rocío Fatás Arana, Sumita Sharma and Grace Eden. 2021. Calling for a Plurality of Perspectives on Design Futuring: An Un-Manifesto. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI '21 Extended Abstracts), May 08-13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3450364

[3] Hyysalo, S., Kohtala, C., Helminen, P., Mäkinen, S., Miettinen, V., & Muurinen, L. (2014). Collaborative futuring with and by makers. CoDesign - International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, 10(3–4), 209–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.98397

[4] B. Gaver, T. Dunne, and E. Pacenti. 1999. Design: Cultural Probes. interactions 6(1), 21--29. https://doi.org/10.1145/291224.291235

[5] Matt Ratto (2011) Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life, The Information Society, 27:4, 252-260, DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2011.583819

[6] Schechner, R., & Schechner, R. (2013). Performance Studies: An Introduction (3rd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203125168

[7[ Leena Ventä-Olkkonen, Netta Iivari, Sumita Sharma, Nina Juustila-Çevirel, Tonja Molin-Juustila, Essi Kinnunen, Jenni Holappa and Heidi Hartikainen. 2022. All the World is our Stage: Empowering Children to Tackle Bullying through Theatre of the Oppressed in Critical Design and Making. In Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference (NordiCHI '22), October 08-12, 2022, Aarhus, Denmark. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3546705

[8] Sumita, Sharma., Netta, Iivari., Leena, Ventä-Olkkonen., Heidi, Hartikainen., Marianne, Kinnula. (2023). Inclusive Child-centered AI: Employing design futuring for Inclusive design of inclusive AI by and with children in Finland and India. arXiv.org,  doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2304.08041

‍

‍

Top