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A methodological stance for participatory AI
AI from the Margins
A preparatory stage of participatory AI that centers the lived experiences of minoritized communities — ensuring their standpoint shapes what AI is for, before problem definitions, success criteria, or design artifacts are set.
About
Why it matters
AI is increasingly embedded in healthcare — shaping clinical decision-making, disease detection, and support for daily living. Despite its promise, AI applications can reproduce and amplify existing inequities, creating particular vulnerabilities for minoritized communities.
Participatory AI promises to involve affected communities in shaping the systems that affect them. In practice, however, participation typically starts only after problem definitions and success criteria have already been set — leaving limited room for communities to reshape what an AI system is actually for.
AIM addresses this gap. Rather than treating lived experience as one input among many within an existing design process, AIM positions it as the preparatory foundation from which participatory AI design begins. This is not a procedural adjustment — it is an epistemic one: the standpoint of those most affected by AI's harms is the starting point, not an afterthought.
The method
Seven preconditions
Click any branch to explore
AIM
AIM is not a fixed protocol — it is a methodological stance. Seven preconditions must be in place for participatory AI to genuinely center the lived experiences of minoritized communities. Click any branch to explore each one.
These preconditions are mutually constitutive.
They cannot be implemented independently — each one creates the conditions under which the others can function.
They cannot be implemented independently — each one creates the conditions under which the others can function.
Application
Four lived experience sessions
AIM's preconditions were enacted in one application through four dedicated sessions. The techniques are substitutable — the preconditions are not.
01
Sharing lived experience
Each participant tells their story in their own words, prompted by a Single Question aimed at Inducing Narrative (SQUIN). Peers ask follow-up questions through Socratic dialogue. Reciprocity and co-ownership are established from the outset.
May span multiple meetings to ensure every voice is heard fully.02
Collective rules
Individual narratives become the foundation for collective reflection. Participants articulate shared rules for equitable practice — moving from personal accounts toward principles they define and own. A decolonizing move: from objects of study to agents of inquiry.
03
If, where, and how
Participants determine whether AI should play a role at all, and if so where and how — including through visual methods such as Rich Picture. Technical framing enters only after lived experience has been articulated on its own terms. Refusal of AI is a legitimate outcome.
04
Embedding in policy
Policy workers join participants to discuss how AI governance can safeguard lived experiences. The session surfaces — rather than smooths over — asymmetry between institutional and experiential framings. Policy moves toward lived experience, not the reverse.
Publications
Research
2026
AI From the Margins (AIM): Rethinking Participatory AI Design Through the Lived Experience of Minoritized Communities
The full paper introducing AIM as a methodological stance, presenting its seven preconditions, and reporting findings from eight lived experience sessions with thirteen women and non-binary people of color in a Dutch healthcare context.
Submitted — AIES 20262026
BNIM in participatory AI design: centering minoritized lived experiences in healthcare
Earlier work applying the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) in healthcare AI research, surfacing requirements for AI grounded in participants' own accounts. The methodological foundation that AIM extends into a four-session preparatory framework.
ACM FAccT 2026Theoretical grounding
Built on the work of
AIM draws on and synthesizes a body of scholarship across standpoint theory, decolonizing research, feminist design, and participatory methods.
- Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press.
- Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge.
- Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.
- hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
- Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6).
- Wengraf, T. (2001). Qualitative Research Interviewing: Biographic Narrative and Semi-Structured Methods. SAGE.
- Sloane, M. et al. (2022). Participation is not a design fix for machine learning. ACM EAAMO '22.
- Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6).
Contact
Get in touch
Interested in the AIM method, a collaboration, or a presentation? Fill in the form below.
Or email directly at info@aifromthemargins.com
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