Crafting Participatory Tech Futures: Proposal for a CRAFT (Critiquing and Rethinking Accountability, Fairness, and Transparency) session

“Artificial intelligence” (AI) is often framed as an inevitable force—a future unfolding beyond collective control and concentrated in the hands of a technological elite. But 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 expert facilitation and participatory world-building, we will move beyond abstract optimism or dystopian critique, and instead co-define actionable, justice-oriented AI futures. The session unfolds in three interconnected phases: Discovery, Encounters, and Crafting. You can now register to the FAccT conference here: https://web.cvent.com/event/f0c3c378-84fc-4554-8d48-0362d7e41942/summary Sign up to receive updates about the broader initiatives here (if you have a Google Account) or here (if you don't). We have a Prompts Library, which you can read more about and contribute to here.