This article explores speculative fiction as a participatory method for technology assessment and futures studies. Building on Braun’s Literary Futures approach, an asynchronous workshop centered around Dave Eggers’ The Circle invited participants to use literary analysis and foresight tools to examine how narrative structures shape perceptions of technological futures. The study demonstrates how literature can foster resonant and grounded reflection, enabling non-experts to co-create alternative sociotechnical imaginaries. Findings suggest that speculative fiction can act as an epistemic interface between expert foresight and public imaginaries, making moral and emotional knowledge visible within anticipatory governance. The article thus positions literature as a methodological and epistemological resource for inclusive and responsible innovation.

Data is central to AI performance, yet its curation remains an invisible and labour-intensive process, often leading to biases and reliability issues. While HCI has explored methods to improve data work, a growing body of research embraces data imperfections in an artistic vein to provoke reflection on human-AI relations. This workshop examines "Data Craft"- practices that creatively manipulate data to challenge conventional AI narratives and lower barriers to public engagement. By framing data craft as a boundary practice, we explore its potential to foster dialogue on AI capabilities, limitations, and societal impact. The workshop will investigate how data craft can be systematically integrated into participatory AI efforts, moving beyond artistic spaces to inform public debate. Through hands-on exploration, we aim to uncover strategies for leveraging data craft to engage diverse communities in shaping AI discourse.

This work illustrates how artistic robotic systems can provide a reservoir of unfamiliarity and a basis for speculation, to open the field toward new ways of thinking about HRI. We reflect on a collaborative project between design students, a media art studio, and design researchers working with the baggage handling department of the Schiphol airport. Engaging with the industrial context, we developed 'metabehaviours' - abstracted ideas of processes carried out on the worksite-and passed these over to the students who translated them into robotic enactions using a predefined hardware developed by the media art studio. The resulting visit experience challenges the audience to decode the installation in terms of metabehaviours and their possible relations to industrial HRI. We used this to reflect on the value of conducting artistic and speculative work in HRI and to distil actionable recommendations for future research.