Participatory AI: A Scandinavian Approach to Human-Centered AI
Abstract
AI's transformative impact on work, education, and everyday life makes it as much a political artifact as a technological one. Current AI models are opaque, centralized, and overly generic. The algorithmic automation they provide threatens human agency and democratic values in both workplaces and daily life. To confront such challenges, we turn to Scandinavian Participatory Design (PD), which was devised in the 1970s to face a similar threat from mechanical automation. In the PD tradition, technology is seen not just as an artifact, but as a locus of democracy. Drawing from this tradition, we propose Participatory AI as a PD approach to human-centered AI that applies five PD principles to four design challenges for algorithmic automation. We use concrete case studies to illustrate how to treat AI models less as proprietary products and more as shared socio-technical systems that enhance rather than diminish human agency, human dignity, and human values.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.12752,
title = {Participatory AI: A Scandinavian Approach to Human-Centered AI},
author = {Niklas Elmqvist and Eve Hoggan and Hans-Jörg Schulz and Marianne Graves Petersen and Peter Dalsgaard and Ira Assent and Olav W. Bertelsen and Akhil Arora and Kaj Grønbæk and Susanne Bødker and Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose and Rachel Charlotte Smith and Sebastian Hubenschmid and Christoph A. Johns and Gabriela Molina León and Anton Wolter and Johannes Ellemose and Vaishali Dhanoa and Simon Aagaard Enni and Mille Skovhus Lunding and Karl-Emil Kjær Bilstrup and Juan Sánchez Esquivel and Luke Connelly and Rafael Pablos Sarabia and Morten Birk and Joachim Nyborg and Stefanie Zollmann and Tobias Langlotz and Meredith Siang-Yun Chou and Jens Emil Sloth Grønbæk and Michael Wessely and Yijing Jiang and Caroline Berger and Duosi Dai and Michael Mose Biskjaer and Germán Leiva and Jonas Frich and Eva Eriksson and Kim Halskov and Thorbjørn Mikkelsen and Nearchos Potamitis and Michel Yildirim and Arvind Srinivasan and Jeanette Falk and Nanna Inie and Ole Sejer Iversen and Hugo Andersson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.12752},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
32 pages, 7 figures