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.

Design guidelines serve as an important conceptual tool to guide designers of interactive applications with well-established principles and heuristics. Consulting domain experts is a common way to develop guidelines. However, experts are often not easily accessible, and their time can be expensive. This problem poses challenges in developing comprehensive and practical guidelines. We propose a new guideline development method that uses online public videos as the basis for capturing diverse patterns of design goals and interaction primitives. In a case study focusing on AR-based assembly instructions, we apply our novel Identify-Rationalize pipeline, which distills design patterns from videos featuring AR-based assembly instructions (N=146) into a set of guidelines that cover a wide range of design considerations. The evaluation conducted with 16 AR designers indicated that the pipeline is useful for generating comprehensive guidelines. We conclude by discussing the transferability and practicality of our method.

In this doctoral research program, the influence of algorithms on creative perception and construction is investigated. First, I outline the need for a clear framework that aims to measure viewer-defined online creativity. To meet this need, I offer a 5-part mixed methods approach that synthesizes qualitative, quantitative, and visual data to construct a conception of online visual creativity. Then, I discuss applications of this framework to measure the impact of emerging technologies on human creativity. In a second study, I demonstrate the influence of TikTok's algorithm on the content being filmed by its users; in particular, I investigate the Duet feature as a site of remixing rather than creatively collaborating. In sum, algorithms are shown to influence creative consumers by both curating the content that one is exposed to and by guiding the content that is initially created. Next steps for my dissertation work are also discussed.

Compound icons are prevalent on signs, webpages, and infographics, effectively conveying complex and abstract concepts, such as "no smoking" and "health insurance", with simple graphical representations. However, designing such icons requires experience and creativity, in order to efficiently navigate the semantics, space, and style features of icons. In this paper, we aim to automate the process of generating icons given compound concepts, to facilitate rapid compound icon creation and ideation. Informed by ethnographic interviews with professional icon designers, we have developed ICONATE, a novel system that automatically generates compound icons based on textual queries and allows users to explore and customize the generated icons. At the core of ICONATE is a computational pipeline that automatically finds commonly used icons for sub-concepts and arranges them according to inferred conventions. To enable the pipeline, we collected a new dataset, Compicon1k, consisting of 1000 compound icons annotated with semantic labels (i.e., concepts). Through user studies, we have demonstrated that our tool is able to automate or accelerate the compound icon design process for both novices and professionals.

This study seeks to provide insight into two-dimensional (2D) artists' approach to three-dimensional (3D) creativity within a virtual environment. Specifically, this research investigates the widespread assumption that Virtual Reality (VR) provides a natural interface by which traditionally 2D-centric artists may explore 3D content creation. Using a prototype of Canvox, a VR tool that uses voxels to represent 3D space with a single stroke [1], we performed a qualitative study in which artists were observed producing familiar assets in a virtual space. Here, we present data on 2D artists' expectations for the User Interface (Space, Navigation, Scale, Tool Accessibility, Lighting), Functionality (Tool Functionality, Materials, Brushes, Primitives), Applications (Communication Mechanisms, Use Cases), and User Mindset (Ideation, Creation, Opportunities) for VR creation. Our results offer insights into the bifurcations between artists' mental models of 2D and VR creativity: in VR, artists expect to create content, while in 2D, artists expect to render representations of content. We also demonstrate the potential use cases of this emerging creative platform.