Welcome to the Workshop on Using Public Displays to Tackle Societal Effects of AI!

Digital information systems, such as news platforms and social media, make up a large portion of many people’s daily information consumption, shaping how individuals understand and interpret the world around them. Yet recent developments, including hyper-targeted news and AI-generated content, have led to negative consequences. Filter bubbles, misinformation, and biased or distorted presentation of facts erode public trust and weaken social cohesion.

This workshop explores how public displays can foster more balanced information engagement and help counter these effects. Participants will share perspectives on how HCI research can address current societal challenges through user engagement with public displays and interactive interfaces in public spaces. Together, we will identify and synthesize collective challenges, explore design concepts, and outline promising future research directions and strategies for employing public displays for societal good.

Call for Participation

We explore the potential of public displays and public interactive interfaces for the social and societal good. We welcome contributions from various backgrounds that relate to the social and societal effects of technology, as well as researchers who are interested in application cases of public displays. The ideation benefits from broad perspectives – we thereby also invite contributions without focus on public displays but some relation to social media, conversational user interfaces, conversational agents (CAs), and researchers working on related social sciences perspective. Participants are requested to submit a position paper, which, upon acceptance, will be published on the website.

In their submission, we encourage the authors to reflect on one or multiple of the following points without being limited to these:

• How has the development of information systems shaped society, discourse, and the media landscape in the past years?
• Which role do the recent AI capabilities play?
• Which challenges arise through the increasing relevance of social media in the context of public information and debate?
• Which effects arise from the current social media platform design?
• How do specific design features of social media interfaces foster or mitigate positive and negative developments?
• Which challenges are fostered or mitigated through the proliferation of AI?
• What (societal) issue(s) yielding from AI is your research tackling?
• Which capabilities, strengths, but also limitations did you encounter when working with public displays?
• Which directions for future research should we pursue?

Workshop Date: Monday, the 16th of March 2026

Submission Deadline: 07. February 2026 (AoE)

Submission Link: PDS@PerDIS26 on EasyChair

Submission Types: An abstract (ca. 300 words) that describes an idea, position, current work, or completed project that evolves around the topics of the workshop. We also motivate workshop participants to give a short talk introducing their submission (optional).

Notes:

• At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop in person. All participants must register for the workshop and at least one conference day.
• The talks and presentations will take place physically and be on-site at PerDis 2026 in Munich.

Organizers