by Sowmya Somanath from University of Victoria | Reblogged from https://medium.com/@labvixi/paving-the-way-for-ai-that-supports-flourishing-at-work-chiwork25-workshop-314f9c1fadcf

We recently ran a workshop at CHIWORK together with Sowmya Somanath and others. Sowmya wrote a blogpost for the VIXI lab blog which we are reblogging here.

We recently conducted a workshop on the topic of AI and ways it can support flourishing at work [1] during the CHIWORK’25 conference. During the workshop we discussed questions such as: What does flourishing mean in the context of work? How might AI help? Is it currently helping? Why not? We had a fantastic group of attendees who shared many great ideas and thoughts on these topics. This blog post briefly summarizes our discussions.

Our workshop was attended by 27 participants and included students, professors, and industry researchers. Participants had many different research interests. Related to work, participants were interested in domains such as human creativity, and craft work, and processes such as how care is provided in work contexts, and how technologies and work practices influence each other. Regarding AI, participants thought about how AI can augment human intelligence, human-AI collaboration, and AI’s impact on human experiences. Lastly, participants conceived flourishing in different ways, including longer-term happiness and health, engagement, protecting labour, resilience, protecting against burnout, and empowering people to prioritize things that matter to them.

A photo from the workshop. Participants: Regan Mandryk, Sabrina Burtscher, Kevin Chow, Michael Muller, Juliance Busboom, Simone Ooms, Marta Cecchinato, Raza Mohsin Chaudhry, Kuntal Ghosh, Marios Constantinides, Sarah Frampton, Marcia Ash, (Nancy) Qing Xia, Charles Chiang, Soyun Lee, Alina Lushnikova, Virpi Roto, Alessandro Fornaroli, Minha Lee, Gulbahar Coskun, Ekaterina Uetova, Zoe Mitchell, Samiksha Singh, Janne Lindqvist, Vera Khovanskaya, Chaeyeon, Yifei Gao. Workshop organizers: Yoana Ahmetoglu, Carine Lallemand, Erin T. Solovey, Duncan P. Brumby, Anna L. Cox, and Sowmya Somanath.

During the workshop, we engaged in three main activities — 1) identifying a research problem/opportunity that highlights challenges for flourishing at work, 2) a quick analysis of AI tools and how they can(not) support flourishing at work, and 3) reflection on what we might stop, start, and continue doing in HCI research to facilitate flourishing at work in the era of AI tools.

Related to research challenges, a common theme that was echoed often related to flourishing by bringing back the focus to things that make us human. These included aspects such as enabling identity formation, wanting control and autonomy, and thinking about our contributions not in terms of numbers, but in terms of the people and experiences that make a project successful. Within such a framing, AI tools were considered to be like a “double-edged sword” — wherein they both helped people (e.g., sometimes people don’t always know what might help them flourish and tools can facilitate reflection) and at other times came in their way of flourishing (e.g., over-reliance, may push normativity, and built in politics). The double-edged nature of AI however is not an easy problem to solve given its generative nature and its rapid integration into workplaces. Our participants shared many thoughts on what we might do next. For example, some argued that we should stop equating productivity to flourishing, while others suggested that perhaps we should stop thinking in terms of utopia and dystopia, and think about the scenarios that exist in between these extremes. Suggestions to move forward included thinking back to human relationships with non-human intelligences and drawing inspiration from those, focusing on understanding the meaning behind AI tool use, and going back to the basics of understanding humans and their contexts much more deeply before we focus on tools.

For me this was a very rich workshop experience that generated a lot of food for thought! The wide ranging responses to the types of work, AI-related questions, and what flourishing means highlights the exciting possibilities for future research directions to which HCI researchers can contribute! Work, while not the only part of our lives, is integral and an important aspect of many people’s lives and so I believe these discussions are important, and we must have them now while so many people are thinking about AI tools. If these topics interest you, please reach out — collaborations and research partnerships I think are key to advancing these topics in a meaningful and reflective way. Let us continue the conversation on how we can flourish* — at work or outside, and in the era of AI or not!

Reference:

[1] Yoana Ahmetoglu, Sowmya Somanath, Carine Lallemand, Erin T. Solovey, Duncan P. Brumby, and Anna L. Cox. “Paving the Way for AI that Supports Flourishing at Work.” In Adjunct Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work, pp. 1–3. 2025. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3707640.3729208

Understanding Flourishing

* If you are interested or curious about Flourishing as a concept, here is a very brief primer we put together for the workshop as a starting point for discussions:

Note: this is not a comprehensive primer and there are several other papers and concepts that describe aspects of flourishing.

a. PERMA: Flourishing is a state we create when we tend to PERMA (Seligman, Martin EP. Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Simon and Schuster, 2011.)

PERMA maps to: Positive Emotions, Accomplishment, Engagement or flow, Relationships and Meaning

b. Positive Design: “flourishing is referred to as optimal human functioning and living to one’s full potential (Ryan & Deci, 2001)” and we can enable or simulate human flourishing when we design for the following three elements — virtue, pleasure, and personal significance. The emphasis can be on one of the elements but the design must not negatively impact the other two elements. (Desmet, Pieter MA, and Anna E. Pohlmeyer. “Positive design: An introduction to design for subjective well-being.” International journal of design 7.3 (2013).)

c. Positive Computing: The design and development of technology to support psychological wellbeing and human potential is referred to as “ positive computing” (Calvo, R. A., & Peters, D. (2014). Positive computing : technology for wellbeing and human potential. MIT Press.)

Below are four approaches to positive computing:

d. Designing for Happiness: Where should we begin design? Determinant factors or Strategies? (Somanath, Sowmya, Bahare Bakhtiari, and Regan L. Mandryk. “Design Fiction on Capturing, Amplifying, and Instilling Happiness in Work.” Proceedings of CHIWORK 2024.)

e. SDT theory: proposes that satisfaction of basic psychological needs — to experience competence, autonomy, and relatedness to others — can foster flourishing (Ryan, R. M., Ryan, W. S., Di Domenico, S. I., & Deci, E. L. (2019). The nature and the conditions of human autonomy and flourishing. The Oxford handbook of human motivation, 89.)