AI Museum for Accessibility @Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa

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I had the honor of being invited as the opening keynote speaker at Mind the AI-GAP 2025, a featured event in the pre-conference program of the Hybrid Human Artificial Intelligence (HHAI) Conference. HHAI is now in its fourth edition and continues to be a global forum for researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders exploring the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligences.

Mind the AI-GAP 2025 event focused on the topic of “Co-designing socio-technical systems”, addressing critical issues of fairness, bias, and discrimination in AI technologies. The program brought together a diverse array of stakeholders—including academics, entrepreneurs, and NGOs—for a day of presentations, a poster session, and hands-on activities. The goal: to share practices, tools, theories, and strategies for implementing participatory AI as a force for inclusive and transparent systems design.

In my keynote, titled “AI in the Museum: A Participatory Approach to Customized Accessibility”, I had the opportunity to share Ecosistemica’s experience in co-designing a conversational agent with MAXXI Museum in Rome. The central challenge we faced was how to reconcile the museum’s intense cultural production with the need to ensure universal accessibility. The project did not begin with a predefined technological solution, but with a shared methodology grounded in systems thinking and collaborative design.

Through a structured process involving desk research, mapping, and co-design, the project brought together museum departments and working groups focused on different forms of disability. These collaborations explored access needs, technological possibilities, and common values. In order to support transparency and collective ownership of knowledge, we organized key resources in a shared Zotero library, while the design process was supported by collaborative tools such as Miro.

Our work emphasized the importance of embedding participation intentionally into the process, viewing design not as a tool for problem-solving, but as a means of shaping agency and inclusion, especially of the marginalized actors of the ecosystem. Ethical principles and accessibility considerations were central throughout, culminating in a final report that presents the proposed system, its features, and the participatory and ethical frameworks guiding its development.

One of the most valuable aspects of this journey was what we learned — especially around the role of accessibility and universal design. These aren’t just afterthoughts or compliance checkboxes. They emerged, through collaboration, as core design methods that allowed us to better reflect the complexity and diversity of people’s real needs.

The project is currently ongoing and has entered a new phase of development and testing. Two additional partners have joined the process: a UX/UI design company (Sheldon.studio) contributing to interface and user experience, and a firm specializing in AI architecture (Isagog), responsible for shaping the system’s underlying technical framework. Together, we are conducting the first tests, evaluating how the participatory design principles translate into real-world usability, accessibility, and ethical performance.

My keynote sparked a lively exchange with the audience, with questions and comments from a wide range of participants, including academics working on the ethics of AI, art practitioners and computer scientists. Some were particularly interested in the methodological frameworks underpinning our participatory approach, while others asked about future implementations and how the system might be adapted to different cultural or institutional contexts. I’m truly grateful for this thoughtful conversation, that offered new perspectives and challenged me to reflect more deeply on the broader relevance of our work.

My sincere thanks to the organizers of Mind the AI-GAP 2025 for inviting me and curating such a thoughtful and interdisciplinary event. I am especially grateful to Costanza Alfieri (Università dell’Aquila), Eleonora Cappuccio (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), Miriam Felici (Digital Product Designer), Marta Marchiori Manerba (Università di Pisa), Benedetta Muscato and Clara Punzi (Scuola Normale Superiore), and Beatrice Savoldi (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) for their dedication and hospitality.