Posted by Back in June, I wrote a blog: Shaped by the learner about a month long journey that the AI Co-Creators and I went on. It started after I was featured in WI Life Magazine in February of this year (2026) and readers reached out to say that they wanted me to come and talk to them about AI.
I have been doing public talks for three years now (as shown on my speaking and past engagement pages) which I love, but 45-minutes is not enough time to get to the bottom of what people need to know. So, I decided that I needed to give it big licks. Or, in proper academic speaking terms: I wanted to serve, which turned, unexpectedly and quite amazingly, into forming the AI Co-Creators.
After I wrote up the experience and began Demystifying AI in the resulting four-part series, with huge plans to take it much further than the two cohorts I tested it on and a static on-demand course, still in the works, I thought this is so much bigger than just a blog. To be honest, I think that a lot when I write a blog. I often research heavily, think about it, and then spend weeks on it. This is because I am nuts and obsessed with human-computer interaction (HCI). I have been since I was 20-years-old and working at ICI in Runcorn.
I think this attention to detail is why, over the years, academics from universities have used materials from this blog – some have even written asking would I mind. But the Shape blog and the work it described, was even bigger than that. I knew from the minute when me and the AI Co-Creators began working together.
It was fun, it was fabulous, it made me want to sit up all night and do AI, which I did. And, I loved every minute of May. Well, apart from those days when I felt like I had bitten off more than I could chew. I say in the Shaped blog:
Most of the time it felt messy and I didn’t feel confident and some of the time I was just exhausted, especially as we had a couple of the hottest May days ever.
In academic speak, this becomes:
Managing media production, feedback synthesis, and participant coordination simultaneously introduced significant operational overhead, pushing single-researcher capacity.
Yes, I flogged my puddings out, as my mother would have said. I have to be honest here, I have never really understood that phrase, I just kinda got the gist. (I love talking about the gist of stuff and see what I mean? The blog I link about gist took me reading three academic books and four other blogs to figure out what I wanted to say before I even got to gist). But, if I had puddings they were well and truly flogged in May! Through it all, though, I just knew that we had done something special and unique.
So towards the end of last month, I submitted a 1,500-word extended abstract called: From Anxiety to Agency: Community AI Literacy as an HCI Practice for Participatory Agency, to a special issue of Interacting with Computers, the flagship journal of the British Computer Society, published by Oxford University Press, looking at how we can bridge the gap between academia and practice in HCI.
Yesterday, I was invited to submit this as a full research paper. It received an accept with conditions, which basically means: yes — now give us the juicy details! The full paper will be around 8,000 words and honestly I am thrilled.
Sociotechnical interactive artefacts in community
When I started this journey, I wanted to serve people. I wanted people to know exactly what AI is. I wanted people to know exactly how technology works. I wanted people to see that technology is a mirror for society and that a lot of what people talk is absolute utter nonsense. I wanted them to have a full skill-set to talk with clarity and confidence about designing or choosing which software systems to use. I wanted to give people the understanding to have proper conversations about what they really need. I wanted them to not be controlled by terrible IT systems which are designed and put together by people who think they are running a DIY shop instead of an integrated sociotechnical organisation of people, technology and service. I want them to understand that the role of IT is to support people to do their jobs well not makes them exhausted in the daily fight with bad IT systems.
Consequently, what happened was much more interesting than simply creating a course for people to understand more about how AI works.
I did build a course, but I did it in community. I listened to what people actually needed, changed things when they didn’t work, and experimented with different ways of helping people understand AI. And, the community in turn helped me understand so much more about what real literacy, real public service, and real engagement actually look like when you stop imposing tech from the top down and start building it together from the ground up. They showed me what all these buzzwords meant. They showed me what agency, community, creativity, and collective power really mean when you give people the space to shape something instead of just being shaped by it.
The people, the technology, the videos, the conversations, the feedback and all the messy bits in between became part of what I was designing. Academic language calls this a sociotechnical interactive artefact (I know! I call it magic) which is what we do when we create, sometimes in the context of HCI research – though I did not set out to do HCI research, I set out to serve.
But what the term sociotechnical interactive artefact actually does is recognize that this was not simply me saying: Here is what I know about AI. It was the AI Co-Creators saying things like: “You have missed a bit,” “You did not explain this well,” “I like this part,” “I need more of this and less of that,” or “What about blah?”
It was social and technical and interactive, and it produced an artefact—a learning journey, a community, and something that fundamentally reshaped how we all see our own agency including mine.
This simply couldn’t have been done in a UX laboratory, or in an academic environment fully funded by a grant.
Organic and Fabulous
It was so organic and so fabulous. My cross-section of AI Co-Creators volunteered themselves, I didn’t select them, they chose to be there. And when I looked at who had actually gathered around this initiative, I realised what an extraordinary cross-section of grassroots communities and society they represent.
There was the WI member who found me through WI Life magazine and then followed the trail to my website. There was a younger member whose mum is in the WI. There was the ‘token man’ (as I like to think of him, sorry mister) who came along after attending one of my VIA lectures. There were women from another community who weren’t WI members at all. And there was a WI supporter — the lower-commitment option the WI offers to people who don’t want to become full members.
Nobody designed this sample. I was just grateful they wanted to come along when I did a shout-out. And from a researcher’s perspective, it is extraordinary. I didn’t set out to construct a perfectly representative research sample. I asked if this was something people wanted to join and to my great joy, they did. It wasn’t a research thing to prove a thing – it was all organised around: What do you need?
That, to me, is one of the most exciting things about this work.
Where it all began
It began at the WI, because after a career in technology where I had often found myself surrounded by men, I wanted some female friendship and community, especially when we came out of lockdown, and I wanted to be with people in real life, who lived nearby. I had met some WI people over the years, at summer fetes and the like, and I had thought about it. But the WI comes with a certain image, which I wasn’t quite sure was for me. As it turned out, I was very wrong about what I was going to find there and the WI community gave me much more than I expected.
I didn’t really understand how the WI worked, so when I was asked if I had any ideas for speakers, I suggested that I speak about AI. I had noticed that people were talking a lot of nonsense after ChatGPT was launched to the general public and I had vowed to do something. The WI gave me the space in which to do this. This then extended to me becoming a tutor on VIA, the WI Learning Hub, the online service which replaced the WIs Denman College during and after lock down. Now my public engagement as academics call it extends to other organisations, pubs, clubs and residential homes.
As I researched AI to frame how I would talk about AI to non-technical people, another story came out which became my talk When Women were computers. In it, I trace the story of women in computing and think about what it really meant the day Alan Turing and his Turing Test decided to replace women with a computer. And of course when you talk to the WI, there are women there who worked as computers. Other women took early retirement because they were so tired of having reached the top of the IT game, only to still being the one woman who still has to have the same conversations they had 30 years earlier about women in computing. Having these conversations with the WI allowed me to step in and claim the digital heritage which has been mine all along though I didn’t know it.
In 2025, I was celebrated by the WI on National Women in Science and Engineering Day 2025 for championing women in technology. I wouldn’t have done it without them. And, they wouldn’t have celebrated me if I hadn’t done it. This is the power of community. This is what community can do. They made me more me.
The community I joined looking for friendship ended up helping me build a community around AI, and that community generated a piece of HCI research.
Honestly, I couldn’t have designed a better research journey if I had tried, nor could I have met a nicer group of people with whom to travel.
“Oh, the dizzy heights…”
Earlier this year when I was in WI Life Magazine and I was super chuffed, I told an old friend (male) who works in computing, his response was: Oh, the dizzy heights!
I shouldn’t really be surprised.
When I built an online course in HCI and put it on Udemy. I told a (male) academic who said: “Glad you’re keeping yourself busy with your little course!”
My little course now has 1,321 students from 83 countries.
This is something many women face everyday. Our achievements are diminished and overlooked.
However, when I create something with the power of 180,000 women standing behind me and eight AI Co-Creators representing a whole cross-section (including token man) who chose to gift me their precious time and energy so that together we created something meaningful, it makes me ask this question:
What happens when women’s work doesn’t look like the kind of work an institution traditionally recognises as important and what can we do to change this?
Dr Ruth Stalker-Firth and the AI Co-Creators
We created an experiment in AI literacy.
We generated new knowledge.
And, we gave it a name: participatory agency – which isn’t a term I have seen anywhere else so far in the HCI participatory design literature, although it is apparent in the AI literature. I am now interested in whether the way we are using it offers a useful way of describing what happened: how participation can become consequential when people’s contributions actually shape what is being built.
We did in the spaces between the so called real life of academia and industry, where things don’t seem to count as official or real or important, but where crucial things happen. There is an enormous amount of knowledge being created in those spaces. Those spaces hold up society. And it is time that it was counted.
Who Gets to Represent a Community?
Earlier this year when my local WI chose to leave the national organisation following the national decision on trans membership, which I have heard from many quarters was made by people outside the WI. The government made a hasty ruling and pressure groups made the WI get inline. I am sad because this to be is not the actions of the same group who once slow-clapped a prime minister during his speech to them for not respecting their rules. But, sometimes you do what you have to do to survive. I joined the WI for friendship and purpose, and I had found both, and suddenly I was no longer a member. However, I couldn’t simply join another WI.
I lost a friend when I was 18-years-old as they struggled to live and be seen as themselves in a world that did not know how to make space for them, in a world that can be profoundly cruel. I think about them every day and wonder who they would have become, and all the things they didn’t get to do. They needed a community in which they could simply be themselves and here we are many years later making our world less and less tolerant. We live in a check-box, data driven, crazy society that makes me ask:
- Who gets to decide what a community or institution represents?
- What happens when the way an institution is forced to represent a community that doesn’t match the experience of the people within it?
- When will we stop asking individuals to carry the weight of representing institutions?
Representation isn’t just an abstract political or institutional concept—it is lived. It affects whether you feel that a place is yours, whether you feel seen, and whether you want to belong. And while institutions can change, fracture, or make decisions that divide people, the fundamental human need for community doesn’t disappear. We are hard-wired for connection. Consequently,
We all need to be seen and heard. We all matter. The spaces we build outside academia and industry are an enormous deal. They are the real deal. They are real life.
Dr Ruth Stalker-Firth and the AI Co-Creators
An enormous amount of knowledge is created there by people who don’t necessarily have an institutional title, a research budget, or a university affiliation. Women in particular do a huge amount of the connecting, translating, organising, and community-building work that allows other things to happen. And, like so much of the work done by the original women of computing, in my When women were computers talk, it can get absorbed without recognition or reward.
We all count. This isn’t only about gender—it is about equity.
Equity asks a very simple question: can people actually participate?
Do they have the money to get there?
Do they have the time, particularly around work and caring responsibilities?
Can they access the materials?
And do they feel welcome — or even allowed — in that space without being punished for simply existing there
And if they make a contribution is this duly attributed and recognised?
These things sound obvious, but they are precisely the things that disappear when we assume that giving everyone the same opportunity means everyone has an equal chance of taking it up. Equality means giving everyone the same opportunity, but that is not enough. Equity asks whether everyone can actually participate in the first place and recognised for their contribution afterwards. Because we don’t do this well in society, if at all.
To take this work further, including taking Demystifying AI into more communities, I’ll eventually need funding. That is where the academic paper matters: it helps me articulate what we’ve learned, demonstrate why it matters, and build a case for investing in the next stage.
So if you have something to say about AI, community, learning, technology, equity, or what AI means for society, please tell me. It can all go into the paper! Join the AI Co-Creators to have your say.
We are taking grassroots knowledge into academia, into institutions, and into the future.
We are here to make a noise because everyone matters. And it has to start with the 51% of the population who, despite being a majority, remain a minority in so many of the places where decisions are made and power is held.