We helped organize and facilitate a 24 hour Design Fiction Sprint on the topic of Possible AI Futures in collaboration with Ericsson Consumer Lab, Hyper Island, and Blekinge Institute of Technology. The purpose of the event was to introduce students from BIT (oh..that's cool, actually..) to a fresh approach to ideation and concept development.

The experience was remarkably successful. It gave the BIT students an opportunity to learn about Design Fiction in practice as opposed to just theoretically. It allowed for them to do so by immersing themselves in a rapid prototyping, brainstorming context. It also got them out of the classroom and into a vibrant kinetic environment as a form of stimulus that introduces a feeling of novelty and possibility. There were also opportunities to coach the individual groups and encourage them to think thorugh ways of representing possible implications of AI in ways that do not overly fetishize the technology itself. The winning team was successful at translating human needs through AI; adapting a recognizable component of the expat experience as a compelling opportunity to think about how advances in artificial intelligence might address feelings of longing for home and loneliness. Rather than taking AI and trying to find a problem to solve, like a door knob looking for a house, they worked the other way, starting with the problem and wondering about AI and then normalized and grounded the experience in a relatable way.