Futuring Social Assemblages
How Enmeshing AIs into Social Life Challenges the Individual and the Interpersonal
Keywords: Human–AI Interaction, Human–AI Assemblages, Social AI, User-Centered Design
Project Credits: Lingqing Wang, Yingting Gao, Chidimma Lois Anyi, Ashok K. Goel
Publication: CHI ’26 — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–21 (2026) PDF DOI
Award: 🏅 Best Paper Honorable Mention
This project investigates how deeply integrated social AI may reshape both its users and the people around them. Through a three-phase design study with 24 participants, the work surfaces tensions around weakened interpersonal connection, privacy harms for secondary users, and threats to personal agency and identity. It argues for a more relational and provocative design perspective that considers the long-term social consequences of human–AI assemblages.