This paper describes our experiences related to a culturally situated Artificial Intelligence (AI) education workshop for urban farmers. The farmers explored the concept of AI and its implications in the context of their own farm. They engaged in hands-on activities, including using traditional sensemaking practices in conjunction with sensor technology to collect contextual data. They then used a tangible educational tool: a corkboard with push pins and images to build tactile AI models based on their farm data. Throughout this process, they discussed their hopes and desires regarding AI in farming, and their concerns about AI technologies. The perspectives of the urban farmers reveal their preference for AI systems that are contextual, integrate community values, Indigenous knowledge, and environmental concerns, and are rooted in community ownership of data. Our report provides a starting point for conducting future workshops that involve 'critical participatory design' of AI technologies to promote AI literacies rooted in the community.

We are witnessing a novel era of creativity where anyone can create digital content via prompt-based learning (known as prompt engineering). This article investigates prompt engineering as a novel creative skill for creating AI art with text-to-image generation. In three consecutive studies, we explore whether crowdsourced participants can (1) discern prompt quality, (2) write prompts, and (3) refine prompts. We find that participants could evaluate prompt quality and crafted descriptive prompts, but they lacked style-specific vocabulary necessary for effective prompting. This is in line with our hypothesis that prompt engineering is a new type of skill that is non-intuitive and must first be acquired (e.g., through means of practice and learning) before it can be used at a level of high quality. Our studies deepen our understanding of prompt engineering and chart future research directions. We conclude by envisioning four potential futures for prompt engineering.

Information visualization uses various types of representations to encode data into graphical formats. Prior work on visualization techniques has evaluated the accuracy of perceived numerical data values from visual data encodings such as graphical position, length, orientation, size, and color. Our work aims to extend the research of graphical perception to the use of motion as data encodings for quantitative values. We present two experiments implementing multiple fundamental aspects of motion such as type, speed, and synchronicity that can be used for numerical value encoding as well as comparing motion to static visual encodings in terms of user perception and accuracy. We studied how well users can assess the differences between several types of motion and static visual encodings and present an updated ranking of accuracy for quantitative judgments. Our results indicate that non-synchronized motion can be interpreted more quickly and more accurately than synchronized motion. Moreover, our ranking of static and motion visual representations shows that motion, especially expansion and translational types, has great potential as a data encoding technique for quantitative value. Finally, we discuss the implications for the use of animation and motion for numerical representations in data visualization.

There is a growing interest in extending crowdwork beyond traditional desktop-centric design to include mobile devices (e.g., smartphones). However, mobilizing crowdwork remains significantly tedious due to a lack of understanding about the mobile usability requirements of human intelligence tasks (HITs). We present a taxonomy of characteristics that defines the mobile usability of HITs for smartphone devices. The taxonomy is developed based on findings from a study of three consecutive steps. In Step 1, we establish an initial design of our taxonomy through a targeted literature analysis. In Step 2, we verify and extend the taxonomy through an online survey with Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdworkers. Finally, in Step 3 we demonstrate the taxonomy’s utility by applying it to analyze the mobile usability of a dataset of scraped HITs. In this paper, we present the iterative development of the taxonomy, highlighting the observed practices and preferences around mobile crowdwork. We conclude with the implications of our taxonomy for accessibly and ethically mobilizing crowdwork not only within the context of smartphone devices, but beyond them.

We present a design fiction, which is set in the near future as significant Mars habitation begins. Our goal in creating this fiction is to address current work-life issues on Earth and Mars in the future. With shelter-in-place measures, established norms of productivity and relaxation have been shaken. The fiction creates an opportunity to explore boundaries between work and life, which are changing with shelter-in-place and will continue to change. Our work includes two primary artifacts: (1) a propaganda recruitment poster and (2) a fictional narrative account. The former paints the work-life on Mars as heroic, fulfilling, and fun. The latter provides a contrast that depicts the lived experience of early Mars inhabitants. Our statement draws from our design fiction in order to reflect on the structure of work, stress identification and management, family and work-family communication, and the role of automation.

We investigate new media to improve how teams of students create and organize artifacts as they perform design. Some design artifacts are readymade-e.g., prior work, reference images, code framework repositories-while others are self-made-e.g., storyboards, mock ups, prototypes, and user study reports. We studied how computer science students use the medium of free-form web curation to collect, assemble, and report on their team-based design projects. From our mixed qualitative methods analysis, we found that the use of space and scale was central to their engagement in creative processes of communication and contextualization.

In this demo paper, we present the XFake system, an explainable fake news detector that assists end-users to identify news credibility. To effectively detect and interpret the fakeness of news items, we jointly consider both attributes (e.g., speaker) and statements. Specifically, MIMIC, ATTN and PERT frameworks are designed, where MIMIC is built for attribute analysis, ATTN is for statement semantic analysis and PERT is for statement linguistic analysis. Beyond the explanations extracted from the designed frameworks, relevant supporting examples as well as visualization are further provided to facilitate the interpretation. Our implemented system is demonstrated on a real-world dataset crawled from PolitiFact1, where thousands of verified political news have been collected.

On Reddit, users from tens of thousands of communities create and promote internet content, including pictures, videos, news, memes, and creative writing. However, like most social media feeds, subscribing to a very small subset of available content creates filter bubbles. These bubbles, while created unintentionally, skew perceptions of reality. This phenomena provides an impetus for researchers to design techniques breaking out of filter bubbles. Virtual reality provides opportunities for new environments that contextualize social media among multiple perspectives. We present one solution to the filter bubble problem: Blue Link City, which enables contextualized exploration of Reddit.

We synthesize principles across art, design, writing, and psychology to articulate strategies of free-form web curation, for stimulating students' creative engagement with prior work, in performance of ideation tasks. We manifest the strategies in an interactive system and pedagogy. Free-form web curation is a form of new media--designed to enable users to conceptualize and create new contexts--in which they discover, interpret, and represent relationships, by composing readymade and self-made content elements. The strategies are Collect, Assemble, Shift Perspective, Sketch, Write, and Exhibit. We conducted a field study involving 1247 students over 4 semesters. We connect visual, quantitative, and experiential data to show how students engage with prior work through the free-form web curation strategies, system, and pedagogy. We develop implications for design of web curation systems and education. We coalesce a theory of free-form web curation, based on the strategies, emphasizing the roles of space and context.

Web curation involves choosing, organizing, and commenting on content. Popular web curation apps-- e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest-- provide linear feeds that show people the latest content, but provide little support for articulating relationships among content elements. The new medium of free-form web curation enables multimedia elements to be spontaneously gathered from the web, written about, sketched amidst, manipulated, and visually assembled in a continuous space. Through free-form web curation, content is collected, interpreted, and arranged, creating context. We conducted a field study of 1581 students in 6 courses, spanning diverse fields. We derive patterns of free-form curation through a visual grounded theory analysis of the resulting dataset of 4426 curations. From the observed range of invocations of the patterns in the performance of ideation tasks, we conclude that free-form is valuable as a new medium of web curation in how it supports creative visual thinking.

We extend the Twitter interface to stimulate exploratory browsing of social media and develop a creative cognition method to establish its efficacy. Exploratory browsing is a creative process in which users seek and traverse diverse and novel information as they investigate a conceptual space. The TweetBubble browser extension extends Twitter to enable expansion of social media associations@usernames and #hashtags-in-context, without overwriting initial content. We build on a prior metadata type system, developing new presentation semantics, which enable an integrated look and feel consistent with Twitter.

We investigate how presentation in a free-form medium stimulates free-form thinking and discussion in the classroom. Most classroom presentations utilize slideware (e.g. PowerPoint). Yet, slides add intrusive segregations that obstruct the flow of information. In contrast, in a free-form medium of presentation, content is not separated into rigid slide compartments. Instead, it is visually arranged and transformed in a continuous space.

We develop new understanding of how people engage in digital curation. We interview twenty users of Pinterest, a social curation platform. We find that through collecting, organizing, and sharing image bookmarks, users engage in processes of everyday ideation. That is, they use digital found objects as creative resources to develop ideas for shaping their lives. Curators assemble information into new contexts, forming and sharing ideas with practical and emotional value. We investigate cognitive and social aspects of creativity that affect the digital curation practices of everyday ideation. We derive implications for the design of curation environments that support information-based ideation.

Evaluating creativity support environments is challenging. Some approaches address people’s experiences of creativity. The present method measures creativity, across conditions, in the products that people make. This research introducesinformation-based ideation(IBI), a paradigm for investigating open-ended tasks and activities in which users develop new ideas. IBI tasks span imagining, planning, and reflecting on a weekend, vacation, outfit, makeover, paper, internship, thesis, design, campaign, crisis response, career, or invention. What products do people create through engagement in IBI?Curationof digital media incorporates conceptualization, finding and choosing information objects, annotation, and synthesis. Through engagement in IBI tasks, people create curation products. This article formulates a quantitative methodology for evaluating IBI support tools, building on prior creative cognition research in engineering design to derive a battery ofideation metrics of curation. Elemental ideation metricsevaluate creativity within curated found objects.Holistic ideation metricsevaluate how a curation puts elements together. IBI support environments are characterized by their underlying medium of curation. Curation media include lists, such as listicles, and grids, such as the boards of Pinterest. An in-depth case study investigatesinformation composition, an art-based medium representing a curation as a freeform visual semantic connected whole. We raise two creative cognition challenges for IBI. One challenge is overcoming fixation—for instance, when a person gets stuck in a counterproductive mental set. The other challenge is to bridge information visualization’ssynthesis gap, by providing support for connecting findings. To address the challenges, we developmixed-initiative information composition(MI2C), integrating human curation of information composition with automated agents of information retrieval and visualization. We hypothesize that MI2C generatesprovocative stimulithat help users overcome fixation to become more creative on IBI tasks. We hypothesize that MI2C’s integration of curation and visualization bridges the synthesis gap to help users become more creative. To investigate these hypotheses, we apply ideation metrics of curation to interpret results from experiments with 44 and 49 participants.

Reflection, interpretation, and curation play key roles in learning, creativity, and problem solving. Reflection means looking back and forward among building blocks constituting a space of ideas, contextualizing with processes including tasks, activities, and one's internal thinking and meditating, and deriving new understandings, known as interpretations. Curation, in the digital age, means searching, gathering, collecting, organizing, designing, reflecting on, and interpreting information.