Transformations in participants —Toward citizen-led participatory speculative design to create preferable data-driven workplaces in Japan

Companies have increasingly adopted data-driven technologies without employee consent, creating concerns about bias, deskilling, and loss of dignity. The power imbalance between employees who use data-driven applications and organizational leaders who access employee data may be more significant in Japan because of its socio-cultural environment. To encourage employees to participate in discussions of data-driven workplaces, we created a participatory speculative design workshop adapted to the Japanese working context. Our strategy included 1) removing expert designers to maintain participant engagement, 2) mixing individual and group work using different time scales and spaces to enhance discussion dynamics, and 3) holding the workshops outside a company to address embedded hierarchies. The participants created diverse fictional future stories and discussed an agenda for preferable data-driven workplaces. This paper explores the workshop's transformative potential; it empowered participants to initiate a citizen-led participatory speculative design to discuss the social impact of data-driven workplaces with stakeholders.