Speculative & Critical Futures in HCI
Date: Tuesday 11 Nov 2025
Room: S/3.20 Turing Suite
| Time | Presentation | Abstract | Authors | Contribution type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11:00-11:10 | Exploring Creepy Futures: Reflecting on the Value of Creepiness as Design Fiction | What can designers learn from living in a Creepy Future? This paper presents a vision of the future drawn by a fictional autoethnography study imagining and living with fictional devices. Using an imaginary creepy device as a starting point, this paper reflects on the value of imagining Creepy Futures. We start evoking a future in which devices are designed with creepiness as a normative design feature with the description of the Catonator – a device that creates a nanorobotic twin of your pet when you are abroad. Using Design Fiction and a visual representation created with generative AI, we present insights on reflecting on a week of living with the fictional device. Through a reflection of our interpretation as the designer and end-user, we discuss the value of designing creepiness as a resource for responsible futures. | Argenis Ramirez Gomez and Katarzyna Stawarz | Futures |
| 11:10-11:20 | Healthier, thinner or more profitable? Technosolutionism, fat bodies and fat futures | Fat people are valuable and deserve equitable access to society, yet face significant discrimination when seeking healthcare, employment, housing, education and other basic needs, as well as exclusion from public spaces due to the physical design of the environment. Fat bodies continue to represent a site of interest for medicine and for health data and technologies. Yet, the push for weight loss to a ‘healthy’ BMI seeks to reduce the number of fat people to zero. In this paper, we critically engage with values and assumptions about fat bodies that positions them as deviant and in need of medical and technological intervention, and with the framing of obesity as a pressing social crisis, which underpins and feeds into the datasets used to train generative AI models. We posit that this absence of critical engagement in the use of data and AI about fatness and the fat body are premised on foundations of capital accumulation and a collective desire to ‘solve’ fatness, and which are central to the continuing social and medical aims to make fat bodies smaller. Why are we fixated on a medical or technical ‘cure’ for fatness without consideration for the actual health or desires? What does it mean to build image and text generators which are premised on a world that would be better with no fat people in it? | Laura Carter and Aisha Sobey | Futures |
| 11:20-11:30 | Subaltern Futures in AI | We intend to publicize a digital archive Sultan After AI in a form of a hybrid,interactive exhibition at this conference. This archive results from a month-long Human-AI interaction experiment in which we tried to reproduce select artworks by a Bangladeshi artist through systematic prompting techniques using a T2I AI tool. Through the exhibition, we intend to spark thought-provoking conversations around how current HCI research around AI art-making practices marginalizes Global South perspectives. The exhibition audience will be able to access a digital form where they can share their thoughts and critical reflections, and comment on their overall experience, as well as suggest way-forwards towards decolonial design thinking. Building upon these shared perspectives and collective efforts, we plan to eventually develop a design manifesto around AI art. Our contribution aims to re imagine plural, inclusive futures in AI, by not ‘othering’, but embracing subaltern imaginations of marginalized groups who are systematically excluded form positions of power and influence in postcolonial societies. | Abdullah Hasan Safir, Tomasz Hollanek, Alan Blackwell and Ramit Debnath | Futures |
| 11:30-11:40 | Speculative Design of Equitable Robotics: Queer Fictions and Futures | This paper examines the speculative topic of equitable robots through an exploratory essay format. It focuses specifically on robots by and for LGBTQ+ populations. It aims to provoke thought and conversations in the field about what aspirational queer robotics futures may look like, both in the arts and sciences. First, it briefly reviews the state-of-the-art of queer robotics in fiction and science, drawing together threads from each. Then, it discusses queering robots through three speculative design proposals for queer robot roles: 1) reflecting the queerness of their “in-group” queer users, building and celebrating “in-group” identity, 2) a new kind of queer activism by implementing queer robot identity performance to interact with “out-group” users, with a goal of reducing bigotry through familiarisation, and 3) a network of queer-owned robots, through which the community could reach each other, and distribute and access important resources. The paper then questions whether robots should be queered, and what ethical implications this raises. Finally, the paper makes suggestions for what aspirational queer robotics futures may look like, and what would be required to get there. | Minja Axelsson | Futures |