W3: Exploring AI through Tabletop Game Making - Designerly Investigations of the Challenges and Opportunities of Human-to-AI Collaboration

Aim of the Workshop

The workshop invites participants to submit contributions that deal with human-to-AI challenges, including human-AI collaboration, the automation vs control agency continuum, the role and impact of AI regulations, and AI literacy.

Selected participants will present and discuss their contributions as a group to flesh out and formalize a common initial list of human-to-AI priorities, and then work with an original tabletop game-making framework for the exploration of wicked problems to translate the human-to-AI priorities into game concepts and prototypes to directly explore, experience first-hand, and reflect on the short- and longer-term challenges and opportunities of human-to-AI cooperation.

Workshop topics

While AI is being embedded into an increasing number of day-to-day activities, AI literacy remains low among non-specialists. With the help of the participants’ contributions in identifying and prioritizing primary challenges and opportunities in human-to-AI collaboration, the workshop intends to investigate how to increase literacy and awareness in that space through lo-fi tabletop game making as prototyping. The Design Games Framework (DGF) is the tool the facilitators will introduce for game making activities. It was created to explore, formalize, and model experiences via the making of highly interactive prototypes in the form of tabletop games.

Games are closed formal systems, interactive machines governed by explicit rules, and have a rather long history as educational tools since they allow players to immerse themselves in unfamiliar, conflicting, complex situations, try out solutions, see how they develop, fail without consequences or harm, and learn. The emphasis on “game making” rather than just “playing” is an important distinctive element of the DGF: the game concepts and prototypes that are co-created must be learning and exploration tools but also working systems.

This requires an additional level of scrutiny and reflection in the design process meant to make participants more conversant in the human-to-AI problem space, and introduce them to a way to explore such complex problems through learning-by-doing and the creation of games-as-prototypes.

Guidelines to prospective authors

Submission for the Workshop

We invite contributions that deal with human-to-AI challenges and opportunities, such as balancing automation with human agency, the role and impact of AI regulations, human-centered AI approaches, trust and control, and AI literacy. We are especially interested in contributions that explore the role of AI literacy in designing with and for AI. Contributions can either outline theoretical propositions (position papers) or identify challenges or opportunities as encountered in projects and case studies.

Prospective authors should submit their proposals as either long abstracts (1000 words) or short papers (2000-3000 words) in PDF format through the HCII Conference Management System (CMS) before April 11 2025 AoE. Acceptances or rejections will be communicated to authors by April 25, 2025.

Proposals should also contain a one-paragraph outline or summary of the contribution, and a brief bio of the author(s) using fictional characters from games, novels, movies, or TV series (max 150 words per author).

We welcome submissions from students, researchers, practitioners, designers, and decision-makers interested in AI literacy and human-to-AI collaboration who are eager to raise awareness of AI challenges and opportunities, and curious about the use of tabletop game making as a way to explore, conceptualize, and prototype this complex problem space.

Accepted proposals will be distributed among participants before the workshop and discussed orally as part of the initial activities.

Submission for the Conference Proceedings

The contributions to be presented in the context of Workshops will not be automatically included in the Conference proceedings.

However, after consultation with the Workshop organizer(s), authors of accepted Workshop proposals who are registered for the Conference are welcome to submit, through the Conference Management System (CMS), an extended version of their Workshop contribution to be considered, following further peer review, for presentation at the Conference and inclusion in the “Late Breaking” volumes of the Conference proceedings, either in the LNCS as a long paper (typically 12 pages, but no less than 10 and no more than 20 pages), or in the CCIS as a short paper/extended poster abstract (typically 6 pages, but no less than 4 and no more than 11).

Workshop organizers

Simon Norris. PhD student, Human Centered Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Intelligent Systems and Digital Design, Halmstad University. A designer and cognitive scientist with twenty-five years of experience running an international strategic design agency as founder and CEO, Simon researches AI design and how the incorporation of designerly thinking and practices can help reduce negative externalities and unintended consequences of AI augmentation and integration.

Bertil Lindenfalk. Researcher, Jönköping Academy for Improvement of Health and Welfare, Jönköping University, Sweden. A designer by trade and an educator by practice, Bertil works on the formalization of the relationship and natural movement between system space and design space in collaborative design processes addressing wicked problems, and on methods to help designers navigate complex situations and settings, often in the healthcare contexts.

Andrea Resmini. Associate professor of experience design and information architecture at Halmstad University, Sweden. An architect turned information architect turned educator, Andrea is a two-time past president of the Information Architecture Institute, a founding member of Architecta, the Italian Society for Information Architecture, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Information Architecture, and the author of Pervasive Information Architecture (2011), Reframing Information Architecture (2014), and Advances in Information Architecture (2021).