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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses the experience of developing a research agenda on ‘responsible' AI using agenda-setting and LEGO Serious Play workshops with people with chronic conditions, exploring feminist co-design as a way of shaping technology to fit user needs as a “matter of care” (Bellacasa 2017).

Paper long abstract

Recent advances in AI, such as predictive analytics and personalised health monitoring, offer possibilities for proactive management of chronic conditions. However, most digital solutions still fail to support long-term person-centred care and participatory co-design -- essential for trust, accessibility, and usability -- remains underused. This project explored taking ‘responsible innovation’ seriously by incorporating people with lived experience (PWLE) of chronic conditions into co-design activities at the pre-proposal stage of research. We did this in a series of stages, beginning with inviting PWLE to agenda-setting workshops for an applied research proposal on AI-driven applications for chronic care, examining use of existing tools, challenges, and unmet needs. Themes from these workshops were then taken forward with the same group using LEGO® Serious Play, a guided method for group strategising, to formulate research questions and potential application pathways. Finally, we convened a multi-stakeholder roundtable (including technology developers, policymakers, local authorities, and practitioners) to help refine those outcomes into a large grant proposal. The paper discusses this process and its potential and pitfalls as a methodology for enabling PWLE-led research through the lens of Bellacasa’s “matters of care” (2017). We examine the intractably messy tensions of both creating and using AI-based technologies for “care”, and of trying to develop a feminist co-design methodology to incorporate people with a diversity of lived experiences into the precarious early stages of technical research. The results should be of interest to those working on social studies of robotics and AI, health technologies, and feminist STS more broadly.