LARPing Decision Design Agency: Design meeting 19/11

This week we reached a milestone in the development of the major Live Action Role Play event that will be held online and in person in March-June 2026. We have at last decided what kind of administrative decision our fictional decision system – which will be designed by LARPing a participatory co-design process – will be tasked with making!

This moment has been a long time coming. We’ve known since the outset of the project that this LARP would dramatize decision system design (not decision-making as such) as an emerging primary site of democratic deliberation. With this will come the need for new processes, protocols and standards, which will also be part of the game. We were equally sure that we wanted to explore shifting relations between ecologies, data, humans, non-human forms of life and the institutions of government – particularly its evaluative frameworks. But if we committed too early to a concrete scenario and decision to be made by the system that we’d be designing in-game, we would risk over-determining the task and inadvertently excluding important themes and expertise. To help us take a clear direction, some time ago we assembled the LARP Research Direction Collective (RDC), gathering diverse expertise to guide the LARP design process. Meanwhile our core design team of Ruth Catlow, Connal Parsley, and Conor Heaney has been hard at work on the overall game design and play process. As things developed, we realised that we would need to further explore the relationship between policy and legislative frameworks authorising the system, the technical and political-economic features of contemporary decision automation, and the politico-legal effects of design choices.

Making a leap into this intersection, project PI Connal Parsley and RDC member Jake Goldenfein welcomed Dr Alexandra Sinclair of the University of Sydney to the design group, bringing a specialism in automated decision-making, UK administrative law and policy, and the particular challenges of reviewing algorithmic systems using existing administrative legal frameworks. Where much contemporary attention to ethical and participatory AI tends not to address systems’ interaction with long-established legal criteria and institutional-organisational factors, the three of us are currently undertaking a variety of research in this area – bringing together expertise from law, political and legal theory, critical AI, media studies, organisation studies, and the philosophy of technology.

The meeting confirmed and added detail to the concept we’ve been developing this year: the fictional context of the LARP will involve an automated use permit system for accessing a smart sensor-enabled green space, in an under-served urban location.

Our discussion centred on two main factors. The first was the range of technical, political, economic, ecological and legal factors that this scenario raises, considering some of the ways these might be weighed and prioritised in practice in a data-driven automated decision-making system. However, it is also important to think this through in terms of the core design team’s work: what kinds of play, characters and interests will the scenario encourage or prevent? How do we keep the game focused on modelling a more democratic approach to the shaping of agency in decision system design, without being too rigid or prescriptive? Some of these parameters can also be controlled from a game design point of view. For example, it’s important for us to be clear about what aspects of the scenario and task should be contained in the fictional brief – particularly the level of specificity at which the task is set, and how much will be left to the players to invent (while in character).

The second factor was the approach we will take to the regulatory and legislative frameworks around the fictional scenario, for example concerning recreational spaces in the UK, the environment, data-handling, equality, and so on. A key consideration for us is to understand the existing frameworks thoroughly. But not in order to make sure we’re colouring within their lines – an understandable concern of any real-world government decision system. Our goals is to understand how what we are prefiguring might interact with regulatory frameworks in a range of ways. Part of legal ‘prefigurative’ research involves being aware of how the directions taken in the game might require us to creatively adjust or reinvent existing frameworks and instruments. This can be important, for example, so that participants with real-world knowledge and experience aren’t alienated by the sense that what we are doing is riding roughshod over reality. We also touched on how legal frameworks might be presented in-game, and themselves become part of the gameplay. There is also a real-world dimension here: we are also pre-emptively mapping how the approach we end up prefiguring might be accommodated through real-world regulatory and normative adjustments.

So what exactly will our co-designed decision system be deciding? What will be the brief, and what kinds of technical features and political questions will it make central for participants to explore and argue over? If you’re interested in following our work (or even participating in the LARP!), then sign up to the project mailing list for updates via the subscribe button on the site menu. You can also tell us about your work using the contact form.