Investigating How Generative AI Affects Decision-Making in Participatory Design: Shifting the space to make design choices

The emergence of generative AI calls for further exploration of the opportunities for more active Human-AI collaboration in design processes. Within Participatory Design (PD), using AI introduces interesting opportunities for configuring participation. This paper explores how introducing generative AI to create design proposals in PD processes can strengthen the participants’ agency. From an ongoing PD project involving older adults, we use AI-generated design proposals based on original statements as the basis for examining how AI can influence the space to make choices during design activities. We present a two-step analysis demonstrating how participants can rely more on their own expertise through non-technical language and become more independent of researchers as drivers of the process. We find that the use of generative AI can shift the choices available to the participants by reconfiguring how design decisions are seen, made, and evaluated.