This workshop paper examines challenges in designing agentic AI systems from a citizen-centric perspective. Drawing on three participatory workshops conducted in 2025 with members of the general public and cross-sector stakeholders, we explore how societal values and expectations shape visions of future AI agents. Using constructive design research methods, participants engaged in storytelling and lo-fi prototyping to reflect on potential community impacts. We identify three key challenges: enabling meaningful and sustained public engagement, establishing a shared language between experts and lay participants, and translating speculative participant input into implementable systems. We argue that reflexive, long-term participation is essential for responsible and actionable citizen-centric AI development.
To understand and begin to address the challenge of air pollution in Europe we conducted participatory research, art and design activities with the residents of one of the areas most affected by smog in Poland. The participatory research events, described in detail in this article, centered around the theme of ecology and served to design an application that would allow us to conduct field research on pro-environmental behaviours at a larger scale. As a result we developed a research application, rooted in local culture and history and place attachment, which makes use of gamification techniqu…
Warwick University（华威大学）；Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI（阿兰·图灵数据科学与人工智能研究所）；Oxford University（牛津大学）
Participatory budgeting (PB) is already well established in Scotland in the form of community led grant-making yet has recently transformed from a grass-roots activity to a mainstream process or embedded 'policy instrument'. An integral part of this turn is the use of the Consul digital platform as the primary means of citizen participation. Using a mixed method approach, this ongoing research paper explores how each of the 32 local authorities that make up Scotland utilise the Consul platform to engage their citizens in the PB process and how they then make sense of citizens' contributions. I…
Elections are the central institution of democratic processes, and often the elected body -- in either public or private governance -- is a committee of individuals. To ensure the legitimacy of elected bodies, the electoral processes should guarantee that diverse groups are represented, in particular members of groups that are marginalized due to gender, ethnicity, or other socially salient attributes. To address this challenge of representation, we have designed a novel participatory electoral process coined the Representation Pact, implemented with the support of a computational system. That…
Programmable Participatory Governance -- A Formal Framework for Transparent, Accountable, and Citizen-Responsive Democratic Systems: From Deliberative Theory to Decentralised Architecture
Singapore, an urbanized and populated country with high penetration of smartphones, provides an excellent base for citizen-centric participatory sensing applications. Mobile participatory sensing applications offer an efficient means of directing feedback to government agencies for timely identifying and solving problems of citizens' concern. While real deployments of such applications are on an uprising trend in Singapore, there is no concerted effort that studies the {\em user experience} of these applications. To fill this gap, we conduct a market study by analyzing the user reviews on the …
We investigate the feasibility of obtaining highly trustworthy results using crowdsourcing on complex engineering tasks. Crowdsourcing is increasingly seen as a potentially powerful way of increasing the supply of labor for solving society's problems. While applications in domains such as citizen-science, citizen-journalism or knowledge organization (e.g., Wikipedia) have seen many successful applications, there have been fewer applications focused on solving engineering problems, especially those involving complex tasks. This may be in part because of concerns that low quality input into engi…
With the push for contact- and proximity-tracing solutions as a means to manage the spread of the pandemic, there is a distrust between the citizens and authorities that are deploying these solutions. The efficacy of the solutions relies on meeting a minimum uptake threshold which is hitting a barrier because of a lack of trust and transparency in how these solutions are being developed. We propose participatory design as a mechanism to evoke trust and explore how it might be applied to co-create technological solutions that not only meet the needs of the users better but also expand their rea…
Warwick University（华威大学）；Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI（艾伦·图灵数据科学与人工智能研究所）；Oxford University（牛津大学）
In recent years participatory budgeting (PB) in Scotland has grown from a handful of community-led processes to a movement supported by local and national government. This is epitomized by an agreement between the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) that at least 1% of local authority budgets will be subject to PB. This ongoing research paper explores the challenges that emerge from this 'scaling up' or 'mainstreaming' across the 32 local authorities that make up Scotland. The main objective is to evaluate local authority use of the digital platform Con…
