Hopeful Failure: How Collaborative Design Fiction Reimagines AI
Published in ACM SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '26) [21% acceptance rate]
Authors: Jeffrey Basoah, Katharina Reinecke, Daniela Rosner, Ihudiya Finda Ogbonnaya-Ogburu
In two collaborative design fiction workshops, 10 Black American participants — each with prior experience using AI writing tools — used Exquisite Tellings, a turn-based storytelling method, to co-author speculative narratives about AI. Participants consistently imagined moments of technological failure — not as endpoints, but as openings. These failures surfaced resourcefulness, community, and capacities that automation had obscured. We call this pattern hopeful failure: the idea that where AI falls short, broader social possibilities emerge.
Recommended citation: Basoah, J., Reinecke, K., Rosner, D., and Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, I. F. 2026. Hopeful Failure: How Collaborative Design Fiction Reimagines AI. In Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813092
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