Art educators are on the front lines of designing a rising generation’s relationship with creativity and media. While public access to generative AI tools has sparked new discussions and practices in creative communities, industries, and higher academia, secondary education art teachers often lack the digital literacy and resources to align emergent technology trends with classroom goals. We interviewed 19 art educators across the United States, surfacing 1) constraints around technological access, guidance, and agency; 2) five core values for art education; and 3) the social-emotional labour educators perform to create classroom communities. Lensed by educator needs and the sociotechnical contexts they teach within, we call for researchers to critically consider how art education technology can motivate creative thinking, enable peer teaching among students, complement analogue art-making, and prioritise joy over results to better attend to classroom needs.

Creativity Support Tool (CST) research in HCI spans an increasingly vast space of tools for supporting creative activity. But creative communities are facing issues that emerging technologies tend to neglect, or even exacerbate—from plagiarism to algorithmic “crowding effects” on social media platforms. Rapid advances in Generative AI have amplified many such socioculturally-entangled creativity support issues. My thesis formalizes Creativity Supportive Ecosystems: a framework for approaching CST research as an intervention into artistic worlds. I present three systems that apply and codify this theory through practice. We instrument each as a probe in discovery-oriented evaluation studies, exploring how creative activity research in HCI can extend beyond a single user’s isolated processes, towards understanding the broader effects our interventions can have on networks of creative activity. This approach reframes the role of the technology designer as a contributor to the collective shaping of spaces where ecosystems of creative activity can sustainably thrive.

In a productivity-driven culture where high-fidelity image production is instant, producing a representational painting by hand is a performance of obsolescence. In this piece, I paint anyway. In this 2-3 hour performance, human painter and AI-system complete the same task: produce a portrait of the person reflected in a mirror. Viewers can scroll through a growing gallery of hundreds of AI-generated portraits as the human painter struggles to finish painting one—all while engaging viewers in conversation, embracing their condition as an inefficient human body in a physical, social environment. How does the utility and meaning of painting, and other “old media” practices, change within ever-accelerating content production ecosystems? What stays the same? In this act of defiance against the technocapitalistic reduction of human artistry, I ask my self and my community to remember and reiterate the value of human art-making, and other activities of slow human living.

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.

Social media platforms have become the dominant infrastructure for distributing and encountering art online, shaping how creative work is presented, accessed, and valued. While they enable wide discoverability, they also privilege platform-values over artist values, constraining artists’ presentation options to generic, standardized formats. This convergence discourages artists from showcasing work in personal, contextually situated, or non-standard formats. We investigate online art distribution as an expressive design landscape through which artists shape meaning and viewer engagement as an extension of creative practice. Through interviews with seven artists who share work online, we examine how practitioners navigate existing platforms, reflect on alternatives, and imagine more expressive spaces for their work. Our findings highlight key tradeoffs between visibility, creative control, friction, and engagement, as well as medium-specific constraints. We outline design directions for art presentation systems that support diverse, malleable, and interoperable forms of presentation to empower artist agency.

Creativity support tools (CSTs) increasingly include image-generation features. The underlying diffusion models enact a particular image diffusing process that AI CSTs tend to obscure within a black-box. Artists’ creative control is limited to indirect manipulation (prompting), chaining these “black-boxes” together, or using ML-engineering skills to build custom black-boxes. Seeking to maintain the low-threshold offered by prompting, while raising the ceiling of expressive interactions, we built Noise Pilot: a multi-layered approach to supporting diffusion-based creative processes at three levels of depth. We used Noise Pilot as a probe to study the artistic processes of 9 artists over a 2-week period. Artists engaged with diffusion at different levels of manipulative depth and crafted reusable artifacts to enact bespoke diffusion processes; some produced results impossible to achieve with prompting alone. We discuss how black-box AIs in CSTs limit creative power, and propose subverting this by favoring visibility over obscurity, and materiality over personification.

Design space exploration (DSE) for Text-to-Image (TTI) models entails navigating a vast, opaque space of possible image outputs, through a commensurately vast input space of hyperparameters and prompt text. Perceptually small movements in prompt-space can surface unexpectedly disparate images. How can interfaces support end-users in reliably steering prompt-space explorations towards interesting results? Our design probe, DreamSheets, supports user-composed exploration strategies with LLM-assisted prompt construction and large-scale simultaneous display of generated results, hosted in a spreadsheet interface. Two studies, a preliminary lab study and an extended two-week study where five expert artists developed custom TTI sheet-systems, reveal various strategies for targeted TTI design space exploration—such as using templated text generation to define and layer semantic “axes” for exploration. We identified patterns in exploratory structures across our participants’ sheet-systems: configurable exploration “units” that we distill into a UI mockup, and generalizable UI components to guide future interfaces.

Reporting on the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) ecosystem overwhelmingly focuses on the community that drove its growth and price volatility, gaining widespread media attention in 2021. This overlooks the communities developing novel creative practices on NFT platforms. Interviews with 16 creatives utilizing NFTs reveal a vast Art World: networks of distinct communities maturing into cooperative ecosystems with unique artistic subcultures, philosophies, and interactions. We observe unique qualities of these decentralized distribution platforms and identify patterns of activity comparable to those of traditional art worlds. We identify how aspects of these systems might subvert, or replicate, existing systems of power, value, and access. The impacts of policy and platform design on online creative communities in the NFT Art World carry valuable lessons for developers of digital interventions into the creative industry, exemplifying pertinent considerations for the future of creative labor and cooperation online.