BritCHI 2026 workshop:

Preferable Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Creative Technology

Join our workshop at BritCHI to reflect on the past, present, and future of Creative Technology and collectively imagine preferable futures for the field.

David Chatting, Loraine Clarke, Joel Lewis, Dan Lockton, Tom Metcalfe, Jon Rogers, Andy Sheen, Mike Shorter, Martin Skelly, Mike Vanis

Sunday, 1st November 2026 at Brunel, University of London. Submission deadline extended to 20th August (AoE) - notification on or before 27th August.

Over the past two decades, Creative Technology has emerged as a hybrid professional field shaped largely by art and design practices. Creative Technology’s successes have included open hardware platforms and open creative coding environments that have enabled new forms of artistic, civic, and educational experimentation, as well as enriching the tools available to the parallel amateur hobbyist and maker communities. At a time when Silicon Valley agendas seem complicit in limiting creative possibility, we instead see a preferable future in which the philosophy of Creative Technology can support critical and engaged relationships with complex systems and technologies, embracing uncertainty, messiness, and self-expression.

We invite researchers, designers, artists, educators, students, and practitioners to join us to reflect on the past, present, and future of Creative Technology and collectively imagine preferable futures for the field. The workshop will be structured around three temporal perspectives: pasts, presents, and futures. We want to acknowledge past leadership from this community, take stock of our present practices, and seek to explore positive contributions towards preferable futures. We will engage in a hands-on, largely screen-free format centred on discussion, show-and-tell, and collaborative reflection, with activities designed for participation both in person and online.

We ask you to bring three artefacts to the workshop that represent your personal or professional relationship with Creative Technology: one from the past, one from the present, and one that speculates on a preferable future. These might include objects, prototypes, photographs, sketches, demonstrations, mood boards, or other creative forms. Please submit images of these artefacts by 20th August (AoE). We encourage early submissions and will review these as they are received, sending notifications on a rolling basis, before 27th August. We will accept diverse and relevant contributions that have the potential to contribute to the discussion.

At least one participant for each accepted submission must attend the workshop online or in person. There are registration options available for the full conference (including the workshop) or for the workshop individually (£80 Early Bird or £120 later, £60 online). Registration closes on 16th October, with Early Bird discounts available until 10th September.

For full details of the workshop, please read our proposal. Any questions should be addressed to the organisers.

The boids flocking animation is a p5.js sketch implementing Craig Reynolds’ algorithm.