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PlayFutures: Imagining Civic Futures with AI and Puppets

Supratim Pait, Sumita Sharma, Ashley Frith, Michael Nitsche, Noura Howell

TL;DR

These findings reveal children's critical engagement with AI as a design tool, preference for iterative refinement, and desires for authentic over 'AI-like' content.

Abstract

Children are the builders of the future and crucial to how the technologies around us develop. They are not voters but are participants in how the public spaces in a city are used. Through a workshop designed around kids of age 9-12, we investigate if novel technologies like artificial intelligence can be integrated in existing ways of play and performance to 1) re-imagine the future of civic spaces, 2) reflect on these novel technologies in the process and 3) build ways of civic engagement through play. We do this using a blend AI image generation and Puppet making to ultimately build future scenarios, perform debate and discussion around the futures and reflect on AI, its role and potential in their process. We present our findings of how AI helped envision these futures, aid performances, and report some initial reflections from children about the technology.

PlayFutures: Imagining Civic Futures with AI and Puppets

TL;DR

These findings reveal children's critical engagement with AI as a design tool, preference for iterative refinement, and desires for authentic over 'AI-like' content.

Abstract

Children are the builders of the future and crucial to how the technologies around us develop. They are not voters but are participants in how the public spaces in a city are used. Through a workshop designed around kids of age 9-12, we investigate if novel technologies like artificial intelligence can be integrated in existing ways of play and performance to 1) re-imagine the future of civic spaces, 2) reflect on these novel technologies in the process and 3) build ways of civic engagement through play. We do this using a blend AI image generation and Puppet making to ultimately build future scenarios, perform debate and discussion around the futures and reflect on AI, its role and potential in their process. We present our findings of how AI helped envision these futures, aid performances, and report some initial reflections from children about the technology.
Paper Structure (4 sections, 2 figures)

This paper contains 4 sections, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Methodology
  3. Initial Findings and Discussion
  4. Future Work

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: 1) Kids discussed public places of they want to redesign and formed three council 2)The Piku Niku Council, Cat Lovers Council, and the Oogy Woogy Council. 3) They used AI Image generation using prompts to re-image their chosen places throughout Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The figure also shows the kind of prompts used to approach this.
  • Figure 2: The second part of the workshop focused on Council in Session: where 4) participants generated city council debate scripts, starring characters they thought of, with ChatGPT. They were also told that they had the freedom to change anything about the script. 5) After an hour of making these puppets, 6) we taped the scripts with the changes behind the curtain for them to read aloud and perform