Talk: José Lizárraga presents "Fabulating Futuros Fantasticos: Prototyping Speculative Futures Through Intergenerational Hacking, Making, and Tinkering"

José Ramón Lizárraga’s research focuses on the iterative design of learning ecologies where youth and adults interrogate the front-facing and backend dimensions of technologies, including AI, in order to fabulate or strategically disrupt and repurpose tools toward ethical and equitable ends. In this talk, Professor Lizárraga reports on the affordances of a social design-based project, the Speculative Fabulation Lab, an expansive technology-rich ecology in which learning, sense-making, and co-design take hold within and across intentionally designed interlocking terrains—university-based courses and after-school digital fabrication environments. In this ecology, creativity, the playful imagination, and equitable forms of participation are privileged and supported as Latinx youth become designers of new social futures through media production, making and tinkering, and critical AI literacy practices. The presentation will highlight how intergenerational technology-mediated activities fostered the development of critical and sociopolitical understandings of sociotechnical systems through fantastical storytelling. Building on these expanded understandings, youth and adults were able to co-design prototypes of futuros fantasticos that indexed the collective hopes and desires of Latinx communities.

José Lizárraga is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences & Human Development at the
University of Colorado Boulder. His work focuses on learning sciences, critical theory, AI and education, digital fabrication and learning, literacy studies, social justice and equity, design-based research, and STEAM learning.

Co-hosted by the Department of Information Studies and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.