Sofia Fled or Died? Design Fictional Explorations of Unintended and Unsustainable Consequences of Human-AI Interaction

The rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in consumer-oriented products has raised growing concerns on the unintended and unsustainable consequences these products may bring into people's everyday lives. There is an urgent need to better help designers identify and understand the potential impacts of AI products during early-stage design processes. We introduce a new workshop technique, using crime scene investigation as a metaphor, to immerse designers in a fictional setting with a critical stance to speculate on design challenges that may result in unintended and unsustainable consequences. This paper presents a pilot study that tested and evaluated the usefulness of the workshop. The findings showed that, though with limitations, the technique supported participants in connecting their speculations with real-world user events in the past, co-create narratives and various Human-AI Interaction scenarios, and identifying key contributing factors and design implications to foresee unintended and unsustainable consequences.