A Joint Expedition into the Future of Soft Tech

This article is based on a series of participatory art & technology workshops where professional artists and designers, hobbyists, researchers, and tinkerers were invited to four online workshops investigating their relationship to current and future technologies through participatory speculation. Drawing from critical making, the workshops were focused on joint discovery through hands-on making as thinking where knowledge of techno-social systems is produced collectively. Our analysis of the workshop series shows that workshop participants did not necessarily feel part of a joint discovery and that we were challenged in creating the intended non-hierarchical structure throughout the workshops. However, the workshops did succeed in challenging participants’ idea of hard and soft technology and thereby also their own skills. We saw a recognition of the need for dialogue around technology and what it is perceived to be.