Imagine Dragons: Critical Participatory Co-Design with a strange camera

Using paper prototyping, critical making, and collaboration with generative AI, the main goal for this workshop is to collectively and critically explore what recent pivotal paradigm shifts in design research mean for the future of the field. Through this practice, participants will familiarize themselves with the Critical Participatory Co-Design method that they can utilize in their future research.This method was originally designed to explore complex, "wicked" problems in technology development and digital transitions.

In the first phase, participants will agree on a scenario they would like to explore and build a paper mock-up representing the scenario. In the second phase, we will use the raspberryPi based openHardware "kodascope" genAI camera, a simple, transparent machine that takes pictures and, through participant-defined prompting, produces future scenarios, according to the imagination of the generative AI. In the third phase, we examine the images created, exploit biases inherent to the model, and, with the help of reflexive questions, analyse the speculative future scenarios, which represent "Design Next".