This project explores virtual reality (VR) as a creative medium for expressing personal memories through space, movement, and interaction, while evoking shared experiences. Using autobiographic and research through design approaches, three VR scenes were developed through iterative prototyping and first-person inquiry to investigate immersive storytelling. Guided by the framework of immersion, presence, and interactivity, the project examines how design decisions shape immersive experience in VR through the alignment of perception, embodied movement, and responsive interaction. The work demonstrates how personal memory can function as a generative resource for experiential storytelling rather than representational narration. It also reflects on the potential and limitations of autobiographic design as a method of creative inquiry in VR and identifies future directions for engaging collective and cultural memory through audience participation.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly diffusing into design and creative education, reshaping how students ideate, iterate, and produce work. While these tools offer clear benefits in terms of speed and experimentation, they also challenge long-standing pedagogical assumptions regarding the importance of process, authorship, and studio-based learning. Educators are therefore faced with a dual task: mitigating the risks AI poses to reflective, process-oriented design while simultaneously exploring ways to meaningfully integrate these technologies into curricula. Through working group activities, this workshop examines these tensions to identify emerging strategies for the critical and transparent use of AI. Ultimately, we aim to address current knowledge gaps, establish a collaborative research agenda, and build a network to support AI collaboration in design and creative education.

The computer as a creative medium has largely influenced how we make, use, and share images. This study investigates how similarly or distinctively human designers and the computers see (i.e., process visual information from the activity of seeing) in creative practice. Based on the review of the perspectives relevant to seeing (e.g., visual experience, visual creativity, visual computing), we practiced a visual inquiry by marking how we see photographic images in comparison to what computer vision processes from the same images. Taking a researcher-introspective approach, two authors reflectively analyzed the processes and outcomes of the inquiry. The findings revealed that during the creative practice, the activity of seeing is a meaning-making process that is guided, shifted, and diffracted through visual conversations between visible and invisible qualities suggested by compositional rules and computer vision. We discuss potentials of computational visual intelligence as creative agents and conclude with methodological and practical implications.

This study explores generative dimensions of reflection, shifting the focus of inquiry from tracking data to generating insights by visual practice. Two authors conducted autoethnographic research through visual exercises and analyzed structural elements and outcomes of the practice. Five generative reflection stages were developed by thematic analysis of written reflection notes: 1) notice and focus, 2) translate and frame, 3) make with materials, 4) interpret, and 5) continue and connect. Themes and styles of resulting images were interpreted through compositional analysis. Based on the study findings, we discuss some types of agency found by visual practice in generating visual insights: 1) making the invisible visible, 2) de/re-constructing with visual elements, 3) filling with compositional integrity, and 4) re-styling and re-mixing. We conclude with implications of visual inquiry as a means of noticing and investigating agency in design research and creative practice for reflection.

Today an increasing number of personal informatics tools and platforms support intended behavior change and goal achievement through data-based self-reflection. The scope of self-reflection expands with emerging sources, goals, and challenges of human well-being, demanding for reframing recent computer-mediated reflective practice. This study investigates a broader range of contexts and forms of self-reflection that support navigating one's mind and goals beyond achieving preset goals. This paper describes contemporary issues on human well-being and two exploratory studies-one conducted in a traveling artists' residency and the other in a design studio class-which surveyed various triggers, contexts, and forms of self-reflection. By connecting the insights from the two studies, I propose evocative and generative reflection as an alternative perspective to tracking-based, goal-oriented reflection and discuss implications for the design for reflection with a focus on the creative dimension of human well-being.

We present an approach for exploring materiality of digital artifacts by suggesting a study method---material probe. The purpose with the method is to understand how people perceive material qualities of artifacts and to discuss how designers could intentionally and methodologically include such non-functional user desires related to material qualities in the design of digital artifacts. The study procedure and results from preliminary studies are described with their implications for future work.

I propose the concept of expressive surfaces as a research theme to investigate and explore aesthetics of computational objects with its emphasis on forms and materials. In this proposal, I describe some of my preliminary studies to illustrate how the concept has been developed to my research theme. Then exploratory examples of expressive surfaces (the sound-sensitive lamp sculpture and the soft-spiky mouse) are introduced as attempts to specify the theme into a research agenda for computational objects in terms of concept development, prototyping and evaluation.

In this paper we propose SKIN as an interdisciplinary design approach for sophisticated interactive surfaces, with an emphasis on their meanings and aesthetic qualities. SKIN: Surface Kinetics INterface, aims at integrating concept-driven design process and exploratory critical engagement with forms and materials into current user-centered design approaches in HCI research. The procedures of developing three design concepts and prototyping one of them--an interactive lampshade--are described in detail to illustrate the proposed approach. The narrative of the design process is followed by a pilot study and designer reflection, suggesting the broader epistemological and methodological implications of this kind of approach.