Conference Agenda

As AI increasingly enters everyday life in intimate roles of companionship and emotional support, established understandings of wellbeing in design research are being challenged. Conventional approaches tend to frame wellbeing as an optimizable experiential state, typically enhanced by means of emotional design. However, as AI becomes a medium for emotional engagement, wellbeing shifts toward a relational outcome that emerges from ongoing interactions.This paper introduces fictionalized affective relations to describe how users, despite knowing AI lacks genuine consciousness and emotion, nonetheless disclose vulnerability, invest affectively, and derive experiences of intimacy. It identifies three ethical tensions: emotional capitalization, loss of affective sovereignty, and reinforcement of anthropocentrism.In sum, this paper’s central contribution is to frame fictionalized affective relations in two ways: first, as a mechanism constituting human–AI relationships; and second, as a designable space of imagination that supports public reflection on the ethical implications of such relationships.