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.

Playwrights use writing support tools to craft scripts for the stage. However, these tools are not attuned to the challenges of creating live performance and navigating theater ecosystems, instead complicating and constraining playwrights’ processes. Through thematic analysis of focus groups with 13 playwrights, we explored how playwrights’ creative needs and communities inform their tool use, and how playwrights adapt to tools that fail to meet their needs. We found three themes in playwriting processes: scaffolding communities of practice, incorporating voice and body into writing processes, and managing script elasticity across the theater lifecycle. We discuss lenses of embodied practice and non-normative time through which researchers can better understand creative writers’ overlooked writing behaviors and processes. To guide the development of playwriting support tools, we offer design considerations around enabling speech, visualizing performers, and contextualizing version management. By spotlighting playwrights, we illuminate how performance can inform creative writing support research.

Music videos (MVs) offer new storytelling opportunities for songs and give fans in music-related fandoms a new medium to engage.However, the visual-forward and interpretive nature of MVs means they are not accessible to all fans.We introduce MVAuLT, a browser extension for authoring creative alternative text (alt text) for MVs.While alt text is typically an informational description of an individual static image, we apply it to video through sequential MV screenshots for which users can batch-write interpretive alt text that considers narrative context.We designed MVAuLT to minimize friction and maintain narrative coherence in alt text authoring.Through this work, we offer a novel consideration of alt text as both interpretive and informational, a new framework for multi-modal MV accessibility, and a lens of alt text as a participatory storytelling practice.

Our study of 20 knowledge workers revealed a common challenge: the difficulty of synthesizing unstructured information scattered across multiple platforms to make informed decisions. Drawing on their vision of an ideal knowledge synthesis tool, we developed Yodeai, an AI-enabled system, to explore both the opportunities and limitations of AI in knowledge work. Through a user study with 16 product managers, we identified three key requirements for Generative AI in knowledge work: adaptable user control, transparent collaboration mechanisms, and the ability to integrate background knowledge with external information. However, we also found significant limitations, including overreliance on AI, user isolation, and contextual factors outside the AI's reach. As AI tools become increasingly prevalent in professional settings, we propose design principles that emphasize adaptability to diverse workflows, accountability in personal and collaborative contexts, and context-aware interoperability to guide the development of human-centered AI systems for product managers and knowledge workers.