Relating a piece to previously established works is crucial in creating and engaging with art, but AI interfaces tend to obscure such relationships, rather than helping users explore them. Embedding models present new opportunities to support spatially exploring and relating artwork. We built Artographer, an art-exploration system featuring a zoomable 2-D map, constructed from similarity-clustered embeddings of ~16,000 historical artworks. We used Artographer as a design probe to explore how alternative artwork distribution interface design can shape media engagement: we invited 20 participants, including 9 art history scholars, to traverse the map, collecting artworks for a goal-driven task and while freely exploring. We identify values enacted in spatial art discovery (Visibility, Agency, Serendipity, Friction) and consider how these values challenge dominant design paradigms—in particular, the recommendation systems governing contemporary media distribution platforms. We reimagine a curatorial approach to media distribution, within digital ecosystems where history and culture can thrive.

The proliferation of efficiency-focused AI tools in creative processes threatens to undermine critical, reflective practices foundational to design education. This approach can lead to creativity exhaustion and diminished agency among designers and students. As an antidote, we propose Reflective AI: an approach grounded in slow technology principles that reframes AI not as a production tool, but as a medium for reflecting on the creative process itself. This paper presents the Objective Portrait Workshop where design students engaged in slowed data collection, annotation, and model finetuning. Our contribution is threefold: we (1) document a methodology for implementing Reflective AI in design education; (2) provide empirical evidence that slow engagement cultivates reflection on creative processes and technical understanding of AI; and (3) propose material and temporal disentanglement as core mechanisms for Reflective AI practice. This work offers a practical alternative to "fast"AI, providing methodology that cultivates critical capabilities essential to design.

Why were Hollywood film workers striking or supporting strikes against AI in 2023? To investigate this question, we conduct participant observation on the picket line and interview 15 film workers, including 12 union members from SAG-AFTRA, WGA, and IATSE, as well as three non-unionized workers, across roles. From screenwriting to acting, our interlocutors described how studio use of AI might exacerbate wage squeeze, estrangement from embodied co-creation, rush for results, and inauthentic creativity. We find that film worker resistance to emergent and projected uses of AI echoes earlier technical developments, such as the incorporation of sound, color, HD, DVD, and CGI. These innovations initially sparked anxieties about the demise of cinema, but ultimately created new aesthetic possibilities and professions. We end with a reflection on core concerns for worker engagement, including topics of prophesy and the “soul” of sociotechnical labor.

What does it mean for stochastic artificial intelligence (AI) to “hallucinate” when performing a literary task as open-ended as creative visual storytelling? In this paper, we investigate AI “hallucination” by stress-testing a visual storytelling algorithm with different visual and textual inputs designed to probe dream logic inspired by cinematic surrealism. Following a close reading of 100 visual stories that we deem artificial dreams, we describe how AI “hallucination” in computational visual storytelling is the opposite of groundedness: literary expression that is ungrounded in the visual or textual inputs. We find that this lack of grounding can be a source of either creativity or harm entangled with bias and illusion. In turn, we disentangle these obscurities and discuss steps toward addressing the perils while harnessing the potentials for innocuous cases of AI “hallucination” to enhance the creativity of visual storytelling.

Informed by legacies of textile activism, we design Resistive Threads as a wearable probe to investigate potential roles and trajectories of electronic streetwear in US urban social movements. Resistive Threads is an interactive denim jacket that refashions the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s (Dis)location Black Exodus print zine. The jacket plays audio stories, poetry, and music from embedded speakers when interactive patches sewn with conductive thread are tapped upon. Examining the artifact with 10 community organizers and partners, we find that augmented streetwear may take on the role of a housing organizing instrument or speculative garment. In turn, we discuss how we might learn from textile histories and solidarities to recognize—not rehearse—damage-centered research. We close with a reflection on what makes the electronic aspect of e-textiles meaningful to social movement practice and performance.

In this paper, we explore temporal and technological conjunctures of community-based design responsiveness based upon our experiences of making an interactive digital story map amid housing crises. Through reflexive ethnographic work with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, we trace three intertwined genres of temporality in our community-based design process: slow design with care; rapid design in response to the urgency of crises; and disruptive design that seeps in from Silicon Valley, proving to “move fast and break things.” We assess temporal tensions and contradictions in an evolving data landscape by examining struggles over our pace of practice, time-based media lifecycles, and tooling trade-offs. Theorizing community-based design dilemmas, we contemplate ways of mindfully designing with time, making the past present via digital storytelling, and reimagining technological relations over time.

What does it mean to design for a miracle—an ineffable phenomenon that might just exist in the world, but might also transcend it? Focusing on an esoteric strand of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah, we draw from speculative interview activities with 11 Jewish creative interlocutors to describe a process of designing a “miracle machine.” Interweaving foundational Kabbalah literature with design inquiry, we find that lived experiences of miracles span life-saving events, effortful acts of love, and ineffable forms of knowledge. We also learn that people envision miracle machines as natural, cosmic, and sensory systems with transcendent capacities. These insights rework a normative focus on the human mind (cognition) and body (embodiment) by embracing the all-too-often overlooked soul as a design resource. We end with a reflection on what soulful speculation entails and the purview that it expands, reorienting our understanding of what machines are altogether.

Despite the central role that stories play in social movement-building, they are difficult to sustainably document for many reasons. To explore this challenge, this paper describes the design of a community-based conversational storytelling agent (CSA) to document digital stories of housing insecurity. Building on insights from an ongoing grassroots project, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, we share how a study initially focused on CSA-support opened an investigation of the role that artificial intelligence may play in housing justice movements. Drawing from 17 interviews with narrators of housing insecurity experiences and collectors of such stories, we find that collectors perceive opportunities to expand means of documentation with multimedia and multi-language support. Meanwhile, some narrators perceive potential for a CSA to offer therapeutic storytelling experiences and document otherwise unrecorded stories. Yet, CSA encounters also surface perils of machine bias, as well as reduced possibilities of human connections and relations.

In this paper, we collect an anthology of 100 visual stories from authors who participated in our systematic creative process of improvised story-building based on image sequences. Following close reading and thematic analysis of our anthology, we present five themes that characterize the variations found in this creative visual storytelling process: (1) Narrating What is in Vision vs. Envisioning; (2) Dynamically Characterizing Entities/Objects; (3) Sensing Experiential Information About the Scenery; (4) Modulating the Mood; (5) Encoding Narrative Biases. In understanding the varied ways that people derive stories from images, we offer considerations for collecting story-driven training data to inform automatic story generation. In correspondence with each theme, we envision narrative intelligence criteria for computational visual storytelling as: creative, reliable, expressive, grounded, and responsible. From these criteria, we discuss how to foreground creative expression, account for biases, and operate in the bounds of visual storyworlds.

Card-based design tools–design cards–increasingly present opportunities to support practitioners. However, the breadth and depth of the design card landscape remain underexplored. In this work, we surveyed 103 design practitioners to assess current usages and associated barriers. Additionally, we analyzed and classified 161 decks of design cards from 1952-2020. We held a workshop with four experienced practitioners to generate initial categories, and then coded the remaining decks. We found that the cards contain seven different types of design knowledge: Creative Inspiration; Human Insights; Material & Domain; Methods & Tooling; Problem Definition; Team Building; and Values in Practice. The content of these cards can support designers across design stages; however, most are intended to support the early stages of design (e.g., research and ideation) rather than later design stages (e.g., prototyping and implementation). We share additional patterns uncovered and provide recommendations to support the future development and adoption of these tools.