Techno-positivist narratives of efficiency, productivity, and “democratised” creativity risk obscuring the material, situated realities of creative work; narrowing how HCI can imagine and enable alternative futures. This pictorial presents four futures workshops with seventy creative professionals that surfaced nuanced visions of creative practice with AI in 2030 through structured exploration of three temporal forces: the weight of history, the push of the present, and the pull of the future. We contribute to HCI and DIS by offering a visually-documented framework for futures workshops with creative communities, extending futures-oriented design methods with a structured, dialogic approach that makes ambivalent attitudes toward technology visible rather than reducing them to simple polarities. By translating these discussions into visual vignettes, created in collaboration with an illustrator, we show how pictorials can surface and compare nuances across cohorts, making the work accessible to researchers, educators, and the creative communities that this research is intended to support.

Doughnut Economics offers a contemporary compass for navigating the complexities of creating a safe and just space where humanity can flourish while respecting ecological boundaries. This pictorial reports on how the Doughnut Economics model can be applied as a tool for facilitating complex stakeholder engagement. We present a novel visual framework and facilitation method to enable systemic and values-led thinking in the context of establishing a new interdisciplinary academic institution. Using a participatory design process, 115 stakeholders from academic, research, and administrative backgrounds explored this model over two studio sessions, co-creating an institutional compass to navigate the socio-ethical challenges of their professional practices. We leverage the pictorial format to (i) demonstrate the application of the Doughnut Economics model as an effective visual framework for fostering structured dialogue to surface shared and contesting values and boundaries and (ii) facilitate complex stakeholder engagement through a systemic design journey that encourages emergent dialogue.