Science communication revision requires writers to dynamically balance scientific exposition and narrative engagement - a process where writers often struggle with competing directions. Existing LLM-assisted tools help with co-writing, but offer limited support for navigating this iterative, multi-directional revision process. To address this gap, we designed Spatial Balancing, an exploratory revision environment that maps rhetorical goals and revision strategies onto a two-dimensional spatial canvas for experienced science communication creators with domain expertise but lacking formal professional training. By building a design space of communication strategies and embedding them into a spatial exploratory canvas, our system treats feedback as navigational cues rather than prescriptive judgments. Our findings show that this integrated revision environment helps writers stay focused on writing goals, reason about revision as trajectories, and explore alternatives, which supports greater metacognitive control and confidence without increasing workload. This work highlights the value of spatially externalized revision environments for supporting iterative, reflective thinking during LLM-assisted writing.

Humans think visually—we remember in images, dream in pictures, and use visual metaphors to communicate. Yet, most creative writing tools remain text-centric, limiting how writers plan and translate ideas. We present Vistoria, a system for synchronized image-text co-editing in fictional story writing. A formative Wizard-of-Oz co-design study with 10 story writers revealed how sketches, images, and text serve as essential elements for ideation and organization. Drawing on theories of Instrumental Interaction, Vistoria introduces instrumental operations—Lasso, Collage, Perspective Shift, and Filter that enable seamless narrative exploration across modalities. A controlled study with 12 participants shows that co-editing enhances expressiveness, immersion, and collaboration, opening space for writers to follow divergent story directions and craft more vivid, detailed narratives. While multimodality increased cognitive demand, participants reported stronger senses of ownership and agency. These findings demonstrate how multimodal co-editing expands creative potential by balancing abstraction and concreteness in narrative development.

Figure 1: Traditional Performing arts theatre experience versus screen-based video watching experience versus Spatial Interaction-based Segmented-Audio (SISA) prototype experience.(Left) Traditional performance, though sensory engaging and immersive, requires physical attendance at theatre venues, extended passive listening, and relies on conventional practitioner enactment, highlighting fundamental constraints in ICH engagement and preservation.(Middle) Screen-based videos provides temporal flexibility but still lacks immersive engagement essential for authentic cultural appreciation.(Right) Our SISA prototype enables active audience participation through spatial interactions with segmented audio elements in an immersive environment.

Rapid changes in social networks have transformed the way people express themselves, turning past neologisms, values, and mindsets embedded in these expressions into online heritage.How can we preserve these expressions as cultural heritage?Instead of traditional archiving methods for static material, we designed an interactive and experiential form of archiving for Chinese social networks.Using dialogue data from 2000-2010 on early Chinese social media, we developed a GPT-driven agent within a retro chat interface, emulating the language and expression style of the period for interaction.Results from a qualitative study with 18 participants show that the design captures the past chatting experience and evokes memory flashbacks and nostalgia feeling through conversation.Participants, particularly those familiar with the era, adapted their language to match the agent's chatting style.This study explores how the design of preservation methods for digital experiences can be informed by experiential representations supported by generative tools.

The use of motion capture in live dance performances has created an emerging discipline enabling dancers to play different avatars on the digital stage. Unlike classical workflows, avatars enable performers to act as different characters in customized narratives, but research has yet to address how movement, improvisation, and perception change when dancers act as avatars. We created five avatars representing differing genders, shapes, and body limitations, and invited 15 dancers to improvise with each in practice and performance settings. Results show that dancers used avatars to distance themselves from their own habitual movements, exploring new ways of moving through differing physical constraints. Dancers explored using gender-stereotyped movements like powerful or feminine actions, experimenting with gender identity. However, focusing on avatars can coincide with a lack of continuity in improvisation. This work shows how emerging practices with performance technology enable dancers to improvise with new constraints, stepping outside the classical stage.

Dancers often prototype movements themselves or with each other during improvisation and choreography. How are these interactions altered when physically manipulable technologies are introduced into the creative process? To understand how dancers design and improvise movements while working with instruments capable of non-humanoid movements, we engaged dancers in workshops to co-create movements with a robot arm in one-human-to-one-robot and three-human-to-one-robot settings. We found that dancers produced more fluid movements in one-to-one scenarios, experiencing a stronger sense of connection and presence with the robot as a co-dancer. In three-to-one scenarios, the dancers divided their attention between the human dancers and the robot, resulting in increased perceived use of space and more stop-and-go movements, perceiving the robot as part of the stage background. This work highlights how technologies can drive creativity in movement artists adapting to new ways of working with physical instruments, contributing design insights supporting artistic collaborations with non-humanoid agents.

Cultural Heritage is not just about tangible artifacts; it also includes intangible elements such as personal memories, community ties, and envisioned futures. Traditional museums and archives often emphasize physical items like architectural pieces and photos, while overlooking people’s personal and emotional connections to cultural heritage. To illustrate the personal connections people have with cultural heritage sites, we designed an exhibition that displayed images created by participants, which represent their perspectives and future visions of cultural heritage sites. The exhibition’s images, generated through GenAI, helped participants narratively describe cultural heritage locations, allowing them to express their visions of future threats like over-tourism and climate change on these sites. Contrary to constraints, co-creating with Generative AI associates participants with personal memories of cultural heritage, stimulating personal narratives and promoting deep reflection on cultural heritage preservation. The dissemination strategies we designed illustrate the use of GenAI to empower the expression of matters of cultural value beyond the physical.

It is difficult to tangibly feel climate change because it must be imagined into the future. The original cave painting in pre-historic times, too was an attempt to imagine the future in a creative space that we no longer understand. Generative AI (GenAI) serves as a tool for us today much as cave paintings were for pre-historic humans to imagine a climate future by interfacing our tools into drawings of our visions. TIME ENOUGH is a collective voice of today concerning the future narrated using GenAI, showing both how we envision challenges of the climate and how we may adapt to them in the future. These images and videos recreate a modern version of the age-old cave painting in the first truly creative space in human history, showing how our imaginations and anxieties of today are mere echoes of what concerned our ancestors from a seemingly remote time.

Dreams are a source of inspiration for writers, artists, and creative professionals for generations, but recent Generative AI (GenAI) tools make it possible to use natural language to record details of dreams in image form for creativity support. This workshop invites Creativity and Cognition participants working in creative fields with interest in recording and utilizing their dream materials to use GenAI to support their dream documentation. We aim to highlight the unique contribution of dream experiences to art and design inspiration and how it can be supported by technology. Participants bring their dream sketches or records for sharing, reinterpreting, and applying GenAI for visualization. Participants will use GenAI with partners to transcribe their dreams, then create an original visual story based on their own practice and the dream inspiration. The outcome is a hands-on experience with sharing dream inspiration and applying it to creative work, allowing participants to share their insights and enrich the emerging community of dream-supported creativity in HCI.

Increasingly popular social virtual reality (VR) platforms like VRChat created new ways for people to interact with each other, generating dedicated user communities with unique idioms of socializing in an alternative world. In VRChat, users frequently gather in front of mirrors en masse during online interactions. Understanding how user communities deal with the mirror’s unique interactions can generate insights for supporting communication in social VR. In this study, we investigated the mirror’s synergistic effect with avatars on behaviors and dedicated user conversational performance. Qualitative findings indicate that avatar-mediated communication through mirrors provides functions like ensuring synchronization of incarnations, increasing immersion, and enhancing idealized embodiment to express bolder behaviors anonymously. Quantitative studies show that while mirrors improve self-perception, it has a potentially adverse effect on conversational performance, similar to the role of self-viewing in video conferencing. Studying how users interact with mirrors in an immersive environment allows us to explore how digital environments affect spatialized interactions when transported from physical to digital domains.