Crafting Participatory Tech Futures

An interactive workshop led by the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN), this session invites civil society, academia and non-profits to affirm imagination as a collective practice. What if AI futures were not something delivered to us, but something we could deliberate, contest, and build together? What if diverse publics could gather to imagine technological futures grounded in real societal and ecological needs, and chart practical pathways toward them? This session invites participants to affirm imagination as a collective practice. Through participatory world-building, we will move beyond abstract optimism or dystopian critique, and instead co-define actionable, justice-oriented AI futures. Discovery: Discover futures thinking as a critical practice that examines how imagined futures shape present decisions, power structures, and technological trajectories. Encounters: Through dialogue and reflection, collaboratively articulate future scenarios that feel socially, environmentally, and politically meaningful. Rather than tightly scripted facilitation, this phase encourages emergent conversation, prioritizing story-telling over theory. Crafting: Tell new stories and potential journeys that link the diverse futures that you imagined together. Part of the programme “A Day of Countering AI Inevitability: Reimagining and Reclaiming AI” at King’s College London on 8th July. Shady Sharify https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0