Generative AI (Gen-AI) systems are being integrated in educational and creative tools fostering the need for Critical AI Literacy (CAIL) in youth. Current K-12 AI tools remain overwhelmingly virtual and rely on global datasets that flatten local cultural contexts and differences. With AI education, there are growing calls for moving beyond purely screen-based learning and inviting interdisciplinary approaches. My research investigates how we can support youth in developing CAIL through a hybrid method that uses tangible making, embodied expression media, and participatory design futuring. To date, I have explored this through three completed studies across different community contexts; civic infrastructures, public city spaces and local environmental ecosystems. Moving forward, I aim to investigate collective learning from all three workshops towards the design of adaptable, tangible AI learning approaches for community-based critical AI education.

Our project supports children's critical AI engagement with through participatory workshops envisioning public spaces. We ran a workshop with 9-12 year olds (n=7) combining AI, puppet-making, performance, and design futuring to reimagine civic spaces. Participants used ChatGPT to visualize changes to local places, created puppets representing different viewpoints, and performed debates about the proposed changes. Our findings reveal children's critical engagement with AI as a design tool, preference for iterative refinement, and desires for authentic over 'AI-like' content. This work contributes methods for engaging children in civic discussions through making and performing futures. It also demonstrates how these methods can scaffold critical AI literacy.

Thermal Painting is a probe to explore multisensory painting, aiming to defamiliarize, or present the familiar creative practice of painting in an unfamiliar way for artists. The system provides dynamic thermal feedback based on what color the artist is painting. In a qualitative, exploratory pilot study with 20 artists, we investigated how thermal sensations influenced their creative process. Artists described how thermal feedback impacted color selection, brush movements, comfort and flow, thematic associations, and memory triggers. This prompts plans for future work around design improvements, an in-situ field study, thermal associations, and multisensory defamiliarization. This project offers preliminary insights into the interplay of thermal sensation and creative process.

This pictorial presents a case study of "Into the Makerverse", a community workshop that engaged about 250 children and parents in combining AI and tangible making to express desired futures for our city. We thematically analyzed 43 exit interviews and 70 (intro) and 48 (outro) questionnaires to surface themes of craft as meaning-making, prioritizing craft over AI, recognizing AI limitations, and moving beyond technocentric futures. Our discussion reflects on tangible making for AI literacy, participatory design futuring for emphasizing human agency with AI, and the importance of collaborating with local communities for AI engagements that are driven by genuine local interest. We extend and amplify calls for AI engagements that work in service of community desires for local futures and argue for a tangible craft-based approach to support this.

Entangled Histories Radio is a tangible interface that investigates the connection between local ecologies and the voices of the American Civil Rights Movement. The system senses real-time ecological data from the base of a tree and maps these inputs onto a curated archive of speeches and music from the movement. These sounds are played through a speculative object: a vintage radio. We position the urban forest as a "living archive" that interlocks with a historical human archive. In doing so, we explore how tangible, embodied experiences can bridge environmental and civil rights justice. This work-in-progress contributes a speculative approach for designing with living archives and offers a material response to critiques that more-than-human (MTH) design can overlook layered socio-political issues if not carefully attended to.

This paper explores how different interaction modalities with AI agents affect human perception of the co-creative process. We utilize the Wizard of Oz methodology within Drawcto, a co-creative drawing system, to examine co-creativity across three scenarios: human-human, human-robot, and human-software interactions. Using a mixed-methods approach, we combined insights using the Observable Creative Sensemaking (OCSM) method with data from structured interviews. The study involved 20 participants engaging in a collaborative drawing task under each interaction scenario. Key findings reveal an average OCSM curve indicative of typical human-human interactions, varied themes in human-AI collaboration, and a notable influence of AI embodiment on participant perceptions, with the robot interface resembling human-human collaboration more closely than the software interface. Overall, this research offers valuable insights into how different interaction modalities influence the perceived role of AI in the co-creative process and provides design considerations for enhancing human-AI co-creative interactions.