Participatory Design Fictions

• Participatory design fictions are co-creative methods that combine speculative narrative with stakeholder engagement to explore sociotechnical futures.
• They employ narrative probes, performative enactments, and interactive prototyping to surface tacit values and provoke critical dialogue.
• These approaches democratize future authorship by involving non-experts in co-creating, critiquing, and negotiating scenarios for technological development.

Participatory design fictions are co-creative, speculative methodologies that actively enlist diverse stakeholders in the collective imagining, critique, and materialization of possible sociotechnical futures, most commonly through narrative, performative, or embodied interaction with strategically crafted fictional scenarios and artifacts. Rooted in, but distinct from, traditional design fiction, these approaches foreground shared authorship, democratization of futures thinking, and the surfacing of values, assumptions, and tensions often under-elicited by conventional design or foresight methods. By embedding participants within plausible (yet invented) futures—ranging from short-form narratives, staged enactments, or interactive prototyping—participatory design fictions serve not as prediction nor prescription, but as vehicles for deliberation, negotiation, and anticipatory critique across domains including autonomous systems, AI, museums, policy, assistive technology, and beyond.

1. Theoretical Foundations and Motivation

Participatory design fiction (PDF) sits at the confluence of multiple methodologies: traditional design fiction, participatory design (PD), value-sensitive design (VSD), critical design, and speculative design. Unlike conventional (often dystopian, designer-authored) design fictions, which aim to provoke or destabilize through the demonstration of artifacts-in-future-context, PDF shifts emphasis to:

• Democratizing authorship: Non-designers and stakeholders become co-authors/co-constructors of the fiction, not passive audience members. Authorship is distributed across disciplines and lived experiences (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021, Wu et al., 2022, Lindstam et al., 2024).
• Value elicitation: Incomplete, domain-specific narratives and prototypes become “probes” or “seams” into which participants insert or debate their values, surfacing ethical, social, and policy-relevant tensions as generative data (Liao et al., 2019, Wu et al., 2022).
• Scaffolding positive engagement: Utopian or aspirational modes are not sidelined but actively developed as correctives to chronic dystopianism and deficit narratives of the future (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021).
• World-building and breach: Scenarios are located in familiar, mundane, or ritual contexts, enhancing plausibility and maximizing the saliency of emergent background assumptions about technology and society (Crabtree et al., 2024).

Foundational critiques addressed by the participatory turn in design fiction include elitism of authorship, lack of contextual richness, externalized evaluation, and overemphasis on pessimistic or cautionary narratives (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021). The PDF paradigm is designed to counteract these weaknesses through procedural inclusivity, role-play, and in-character deliberation.

2. Core Methodological Patterns

Participatory design fiction spans a broad methodological landscape, but several recurrent frameworks structure its deployments:

• Minimally Complete Narrative Probes: Fictional fragments with embedded decision points or paradoxes, designed to be completed, critiqued, or enacted by participants (Liao et al., 2019).
• Scenario-based Co-Design: Workshops wherein participants, often spanning diverse expertise or life experience, generate future service or product concepts through structured exercises (e.g., STEEP mapping, actantial modeling, value proposition canvases, or consequence maps) (Hohendanner et al., 2024).
• Embodied and Multisensory Enactments: Tangible, performative configurations (e.g., dinner-theater, pop-up installations) that leverage ritual, sensory, or environmental immersion to elicit visceral participant engagement (Wang et al., 7 Oct 2025, Crabtree et al., 2024).
• Game-based Interactions: Card or board games anchoring fictional personas, roles, or scenario-based events, enabling playful speculation while surfacing design and policy tensions (Yu et al., 8 Jan 2026).
• Media and Genre-Driven Fictions: Use of formats such as fictional news articles or magazine spreads to structure collaborative, accessible storytelling and critique (Lindstam et al., 2024, Hohendanner et al., 2024).

Three-mode participatory engagements are frequent:

1. Individual completion or extension of narrative fragments.
2. Group-based collaborative world-building or prototyping.
3. In-character or situated reflection and evaluation.

3. Application Domains and Modalities

Participatory design fictions are agnostic to sector, but exhibit differentiated instantiations across application contexts:

Domain	Methodological Focus	Notable Example
Autonomous Vehicles	Card games, stakeholder role-play, policy scenario speculation	The UnScripted Trip (Yu et al., 8 Jan 2026)
AI/Algorithmic Futures	Fictional news workshops, collaborative article-writing, open-coding of assumptions	Exploring AI Futures (Lindstam et al., 2024)
Value-sensitive Design	Narrative probes, guerilla theater, group co-creation for surfacing and coding stakeholder values	PDF Framework (Liao et al., 2019)
Arts & Food-Tech	Multisensory dinner theater, performative argumentation, artifact embodiment	A Meat-Summer Night's Dream (Wang et al., 7 Oct 2025)
Museums/Heritage	Asset-pack scenarios, AR/VR remixing, citizen curator narratives	Back to the Future Museum (Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025)
Assistive Tech	Audio-based, accessible dialogue probes, multi-modal feedback, co-creative imagination	How Far I'll Go (Choi et al., 14 Oct 2025)
Data/Privacy	Persona-based fictions, agency negotiation, data daemon co-design	Data Daemons (Toussaint et al., 2021)
Everyday Tech	Breaching experiments, mundane practice world-building, post-experience sense-making	Experiencing the Future Mundane (Crabtree et al., 2024)

These applications demonstrate the flexibility of PDF to be tuned for technological, ethical, policy, educational, and affective concerns, and for inclusivity across diverse and often marginalized participant populations.

4. Analytical Approaches and Value Elicitation

Most participatory design fiction studies employ qualitative analysis anchored in grounded theory, affinity diagramming, or thematic coding, often structured as follows:

• Narrative Data Harvesting: Story completions, dialogue transcriptions, acted scenarios, or artifacts are collected during and after the participatory event.
• Coding and Cluster Analysis: Emergent codes are grouped—manually or algorithmically—into high-level value themes (e.g., Accountability, Trust, Privacy, Social Cohesion, Autonomy, etc.) (Liao et al., 2019, Choi et al., 14 Oct 2025).
• Iterative Refinement: Cycles of fiction revision, participant re-engagement, and further analysis refine the value landscape and surface hidden or latent tensions.
• Quantitative Signals: Code frequencies, inter-coder reliability (e.g., κ ≈ 0.78), and scenario ratings (e.g., proposed UV = (F + E + S)/3 for Utopia Viability (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021)) are sometimes computed for comparability or model training.

Participatory design fiction can scaffold data for downstream technical use, such as reward signal derivation in inverse reinforcement learning for value alignment, or for the specification of constraints in symbolic planners (Liao et al., 2019). The explicit surfacing of internal stakeholder logic and trade-off rationales is particularly suited to the development of value-sensitive or explainable AI.

5. Impact, Strengths, and Limitations

Participatory design fiction generates several empirically substantiated affordances:

• Surface Tacit Values: Reveals culturally contingent, domain-specific, and under-articulated values that generic abstract theorizing or survey-based methods often overlook.
• Democratize and Legitimize Design: Builds shared mental models, empowers underrepresented voices, and often shifts the locus of design control from experts to publics (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021, Wu et al., 2022).
• Support Early Tension Discovery: By staging “breaches” in background expectancies, enables designers to pre-empt resistance, misunderstanding, or ethical misalignment before technical investment (Crabtree et al., 2024).
• Flexibly Scalable and Hybridizable: Methods are extensible across domains, scales, and participant types, and can be orchestrated in physical, digital, or hybrid environments (Hohendanner et al., 2024, Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025).

However, multiple limitations are documented:

• Risk of Over- or Under-Constraint: The design of minimal narrative “seams” is critical; over-specification stifles creativity, under-specification yields unruly, unfocused data (Liao et al., 2019, Wu et al., 2022).
• Sampling and Facilitation Bias: Group dynamics or unequal participant engagement can skew values surfaced or priorities inferred; skilled facilitation and mixed methods are needed (Wang et al., 7 Oct 2025, Toussaint et al., 2021).
• Genre and Framing Limitations: Certain formats (e.g., news articles, utopian scenarios) may unconsciously reinforce dominant narratives or ignore radical alterity (Lindstam et al., 2024, Dörrenbächer et al., 2021).
• Translation to Practice: There remains a methodological gap in reliably bridging PDF-derived insight to concrete design decisions, technical implementation, or policy formation.

6. Guidelines and Best Practices

Across domains and instantiations, robust participatory design fiction practice involves:

• Explicit stakeholder and domain mapping prior to fiction craft (Liao et al., 2019).
• Scenario or artifact construction with strategic incompleteness—designed for co-creation at critical decision or value points (Choi et al., 14 Oct 2025, Lindstam et al., 2024).
• Use of probes that activate multisensory, embodied, or performative engagement to enhance realism and surface “background expectancies” (Wang et al., 7 Oct 2025, Crabtree et al., 2024).
• Structured, facilitated co-creation adopting role-anchored or persona-driven reflection, balancing authenticity with improvisatory freedom (Yu et al., 8 Jan 2026, Dörrenbächer et al., 2021).
• Explicit in-fiction evaluation and iterative refinement, utilizing both qualitative and, where appropriate, lightweight quantitative measures (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021).
• Transparent documentation and open-ended debriefing to foreground unanticipated insights and support downstream generalization (Hohendanner et al., 2024, Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025).

Guidelines for specific domains may necessitate tailored tools (e.g., audio formats for accessibility (Choi et al., 14 Oct 2025), asset-pack architectures for mixed-reality curation (Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025), or wizard-of-oz installations for rapid prototyping (Crabtree et al., 2024)).

7. Future Directions and Open Research Questions

Current trajectories in participatory design fiction research highlight several emergent priorities:

• Integration with value learning and value alignment in AI: How best to systematically translate co-created fictions and emergent values into computational representations remains an open question (Liao et al., 2019).
• Scaling and diversity: Methodological expansion to wider publics, non-Western, and digitally excluded populations is increasingly prioritized as PDF seeks broader legitimacy (Toussaint et al., 2021).
• Multimodal and hybrid experiences: Future efforts are foregrounding sensory-rich, tangible, and extended-reality deployments to deepen affective and embodied participant investment (Wang et al., 7 Oct 2025, Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025).
• Critical reflection on institutional and genre limitations: The inherent structuring of participatory design fiction by genre, context, or institution may require meta-level methodological innovation (Lindstam et al., 2024).
• Ethical frameworks for participatory manipulation: Balancing the need for realistic “breach” with ethical transparency, participant power, and lasting impact is an unsettled problem (Crabtree et al., 2024).

Participatory design fictions thus persist as a leading-edge, highly adaptive methodology for interrogating and shaping sociotechnical futures, driving multi-stakeholder engagement, and fostering anticipatory value alignment in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.