Down the Algorithmic Rabbit Hole: Rethinking Design and Power in AI

This talk explores how design practices shape, sustain, and can contest dominant narratives of artificial intelligence. Drawing on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as a metaphorical framework, the presentation guides the audience through a series of design research projects to reflect on personal experiences and stances, and illustrate how speculative and participatory design methods can reveal and challenge hidden assumptions in AI narratives. The talk will also present PARJAI (Participatory Design Justice for Ethical AI Transitions), a €1.3M research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research. The project investigates how participatory design can advance social justice in AI transitions across domains such as health, work, and energy—to ultimately, argue for a shift from designing for AI systems toward designing with diverse publics, acknowledging participation as both a site of empowerment and exploitation. The talk concludes with a call for embracing ambiguity, plurality, and collective imagination, as a way to move toward more reflexive, just, and accountable AI design practices.

Maria Luce Lupetti. is an Assistant Professor in Design at the Department of Architecture and Design at Politecnico di Torino. Her research is concerned with all matters of human entanglement with the artificial world, especially concerning complex technologies such as AI and robotics. She is co-director of POEL – Possible Entanglements Lab, a research group dedicated to investigating how people and technologies co-shape one another, and how design can help envision desirable socio-technical configurations. She is the PI of Participatory Design Justice for Ethical AI Transitions, a three-year project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research, under the FIS2 program. She also serves as Exhibit X section editor for ACM Interactions Mag, and as Partner Investigator at ARC Centre of Excellence for Quality Work in the Digital Age.