Reflection and metacognition are central to the creative user experience. However, most HCI research on reflection focuses on clear, task-oriented goals such as to reflect on personal data or pedagogical outcomes. This contrasts with the open-ended and challenging to articulate goals of creative user experiences. For the first time, this workshop brings together interdisciplinary researchers, designers, educators, and artists across HCI, Cognitive Science, Design, AI, Learning Sciences, and Digital Art to examine reflection in creative interaction. The workshop will discuss themes, drawn from earlier discussions with HCI researchers and artists, on: how best to capture reflection in creative contexts, how to leverage the arts to support reflection for ethical change, and how to design creative AI that enhances – not hinders – critical thinking. By bringing interdisciplinary perspectives on reflection into discussion, the workshop will develop a guiding taxonomy for reflection in creative interaction to inform future creative practice and tool development.

Biofoundries automate biological experimentation at unprecedented scale, promising speed, reproducibility, and access. Yet automation also reshapes how scientists experience experimentation and creativity. Through in-depth interviews with nine scientists and experts across academia and industry (including biofoundry developers, automation engineers, and end-users), we examine how scientific creativity is enacted under automation. Biofoundries displace sensory cues, redistribute responsibility between humans and machines, and transform troubleshooting from an embodied, local practice into a predictive, social, and interpretive one. Rather than framing biofoundries as automation factories, we argue that they should be understood as Creativity Support Tools, whose design directly shapes how researchers notice breakdowns, exercise judgment, learn from failure, and progress through success. By connecting biofoundry practice with prior HCI work on automation, debugging, and distributed creativity, this paper demonstrates biofoundries as a distinctive and timely site for creativity research in science.

As AI writing tools evolve from fixing surface errors to creating language with writers, new capabilities raise concerns about negative impacts on student writers, such as replacing their voices and undermining critical thinking skills. To address these challenges, we look at a parallel transition in university writing centers from focusing on fixing errors to preserving student voices. We develop design guidelines informed by writing center literature and interviews with 10 writing tutors. We illustrate these guidelines in a prototype AI tool, Writor. Writor helps writers revise text by setting goals, providing balanced feedback, and engaging in conversations without generating text verbatim. We conducted an expert review with 30 writing instructors, tutors, and AI researchers on Writor to assess the pedagogical soundness, alignment with writing center pedagogy, and integration contexts. We distill our findings into design implications for future AI writing feedback systems, including designing for trust among AI-skeptical educators.

Reflection provides students and instructors insight into mindsets, learning progress, and course design. However, most reflective activities in HCI courses focus on specific skills and content. We propose sketching as a flexible and expressive medium for reflecting on larger topics to reveal implicit perspectives about multifaceted concepts of HCI. We developed “Sketching Snapshots,” an activity to elicit student perspectives on high-level concepts. To evaluate this activity, we ran pre- and post-semester workshops in two HCI courses in the US and UK. We analyze 68 sketches from 41 students, 9 student interviews, and 2 instructor interviews and find that sketching is effective for supporting student and instructor reflection. We then report case studies in two additional contexts and synthesize recommendations for deploying reflective sketching. We propose incorporating Sketching Snapshots in courses can facilitate reflection on complex concepts, improve teaching, and spark conversations about what HCI means to us and our students.

Analog journaling has grown in popularity, with journaling on paper encompassing a range of motivations, styles, and practices including planning, habit-tracking, and reflecting.Journalers develop strong personal preferences around the tools they use, the ideas they capture, and the layout in which they represent their ideas and memories.Understanding how analog journaling practices are individually shaped and crafted over time is critical to supporting the varied benefits associated with journaling, including improved mental health and positive support for identity development.To understand this development, we qualitatively analyzed publicly-shared journaling content from YouTube and Instagram and interviewed 11 journalers.We report on our identification of the journaling ecosystem in which journaling practices are shaped by materials, personal context, and communities, sharing how this ecosystem plays a role in the practices and identities of journalers as they customize their journaling routine to best suit their personal goals.Using these insights, we discuss design opportunities for how future tools can better align with and reflect the rich affordances and practices of journaling on paper.

Figure 1: Text presentation style is a key design element of AI writing tools.This paper explores the possible impacts of five text presentation speeds (i.e.streaming speeds) on the perceptions of tools and outputs.See Table 1 for a more precise example of each speed.Figure text adapted from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll).Clip art figures were generated using DALL•E.

Existing literature on designing AI technologies focuses on personifying the AI system using metaphors like "collaborator" or "teammate." However, these personifying metaphors may have problematic consequences and do not reflect the full breadth of the design space for human-AI interaction. We report the design process of, and initial results from, a participatory speculative design workshop that supports participants in designing AI systems using novel, non-human metaphors. We articulate two current design recommendations for interaction or workshop designers interested in AI and metaphors: Defamiliarization of AI may support creative interpretation of ambiguous metaphors and Explicit metaphorical thinking may scaffold participants’ use of ambiguity as a resource. We also discuss two potential results suggested by our initial data collection: Ambiguous metaphorical thinking may support groups negotiating values and The term AI may limit attempts at defamiliarization.

In each step of the creative writing process, writers must grapple with their creative goals and individual perspectives. This process affects the writer’s sense of authenticity and their engagement with the written output. Fluent text generation by AIs risks undermining the reflective loop of rewriting. We hypothesize that deliberately generating imperfect intermediate text can encourage rewriting and prompt higher level decision making. Using logs from 27 writing sessions using a text generation AI, we characterize how writers adapt and rewrite AI suggestions, and show that intermediate suggestions significantly motivate and increase rewriting. We discuss the implications of this finding, and future steps for investigating how to leverage intermediate text in AI writing support tools to support ownership over creative expression.

In our era of rapid technological advancement, the research landscape for writing assistants has become increasingly fragmented across various research communities. We seek to address this challenge by proposing a design space as a structured way to examine and explore the multidimensional space of intelligent and interactive writing assistants. Through community collaboration, we explore five aspects of writing assistants: task, user, technology, interaction, and ecosystem. Within each aspect, we define dimensions and codes by systematically reviewing 115 papers, while leveraging the expertise of researchers in various disciplines. Our design space aims to offer researchers and designers a practical tool to navigate, comprehend, and compare the various possibilities of writing assistants, and aid in the design of new writing assistants.

Documentation can support design work and create opportunities for learning and reflection. We explore how a novel documentation tool for a remote interaction design course provides insight into design process and integrates strategies from expert practice to support studio-style collaboration and reflection. Using Research through Design, we develop and deploy Kaleidoscope, an online tool for documenting design process, in an upper-level HCI class during the COVID-19 pandemic, iteratively developing it in response to student feedback and needs. We discuss key themes from the real-world deployment of Kaleidoscope, including: tensions between documentation and creation; effects of centralizing discussion; privacy and visibility in shared spaces; balancing evidence of achievement with feelings of overwhelm; and the effects of initial perceptions and incentives on tool usage. These successes and challenges provide insights to guide future tools for design documentation and HCI education that scaffold learning process as an equal partner to execution.

Creative practice often requires persevering through moments of ambiguity, where the outcome of a process is unclear. Creative practitioners intentionally manage this process, for example by developing strategies to break out of creative ruts, or stay motivated through uncertainty. Understanding the way experts engage with and manage these creativity-relevant processes represents a rich source of foundational knowledge for designers of Creativity Support Tools. These strategies represent an opportunity for CST research: to create CSTs that embody emotional and process-focused strategies and techniques. Through interviews with expert practitioners in diverse domains including performance, craft, engineering, and design, we identify four strategies for managing process: Strategic Forgetting, Mode Switching, Embodying Process, and Aestheticizing. Understanding tool- and domain-agnostic creative strategies used by experts to manage their own creative process can inform the design of future CSTs that amplify the benefits of successful strategies and scaffold new techniques.

Version control systems are powerful tools for managing history information and shaping personal and collaborative processes. While many complex tools exist for software engineering, and basic functionality for capturing versions is often found in collaborative applications such as text editors and design layout tools, these systems are not attuned to the needs and behaviors of creative practitioners within those domains, and fail to support creative practitioners in many others. Through 18 semi-structured interviews across diverse domains of creativity, we investigate how creative practitioners use version histories in their process. With the familiar paradigms and features of software version control as an organizing structure, we discuss how these creative practitioners embrace, challenge, and complicate uses of version histories in four ways: using versions as a palette of materials, providing confidence and freedom to explore, leveraging low-fidelity version capture, and reflecting on and reusing versions across long time scales. We discuss how the themes present across this wide range of mediums and domains can provide insight into future designs and uses of version control systems to support creative process.

Style is an important aspect of writing, shaping how audiences interpret and engage with literary works. However, for most people style is difficult to articulate precisely. While users frequently interact with computational word processing tools with well-defined metrics, such as spelling and grammar checkers, style is a significantly more nuanced concept. In this paper, we present a computational technique to help surface style in written text. We collect a dataset of crowdsourced human judgments of style, derive a model of style by training a neural net on this data, and present novel applications for visualizing and browsing style across broad bodies of literature, as well as an interactive text editor with real-time style feedback. We study these interactive style applications with users and discuss implications for enabling this novel approach to style.

Failure, whether it be "complete-and-utter" or "a minor setback", occurs in a variety of different creative practices, yet how it is perceived, handled, and recovered from is a lesser explored design space. Failing to address these perceptions of failure can have psychological repercussions, discourage users from continuing a practice, and form cultural stigma such as those associated with STEM fields. However, mediating practices to develop a culture of resiliency and perseverance is key to sustaining a (lifelong) practice and reshaping pedagogical strategies. In this work, we outline the design space of "guardians", or elements of a creative practice that mitigate the psychological effects of failure. Through contextual inquiry, we contribute an inventory of failure-mitigation strategies from a variety of creative disciplines. We synthesize guidelines for the design of new guardians and present a preliminary exploration of guardians for the lasercutting practice -- effigies and test tags.

Digital fabrication tools have broadened participation in making and enabled new methods of rapid physical prototyping across diverse materials. We present a novel smart tool designed to complement one of the first materials employed by humans - wood - and celebrate the fabrication practice of joinery. Our tool, MatchSticks, is a digital fabrication system tailored for joinery. Combining a portable CNC machine, touchscreen user interface, and parametric joint library, MatchSticks enables makers of varying skill to rapidly explore and create artifacts from wood. Our system embodies tacit woodworking knowledge and distills the distributed workflow of CNC tools into a hand tool; it operates on materials existing machines find difficult, produces assemblies much larger than its workspace, and supports the parallel creation of geometries. We describe the workflow and technical details of our system, present example artifacts produced by our tool, and report results from our user study.

Human hair is a cultural material, with a rich history displaying individuality, cultural expression and group identity. It is malleable in length, color and style, highly visible, and embedded in a range of personal and group interactions. As wearable technologies move ever closer to the body, and embodied interactions become more common and desirable, hair presents a unique and little-explored site for novel interactions. In this paper, we present an exploration and working prototype of hair as a site for novel interaction, leveraging its position as something both public and private, social and personal, malleable and permanent. We develop applications and interactions around this new material in HäirIÖ: a novel integration of hair-based technologies and braids that combine capacitive touch input and dynamic output through color and shape change. Finally, we evaluate this hair-based interactive technology with users, including the integration of HäirIÖ within the landscape of existing wearable and mobile technologies.

Crowdsourcing systems accomplish large tasks with scale and speed by breaking work down into independent parts. However, many types of complex creative work, such as fiction writing, have remained out of reach for crowds because work is tightly interdependent: changing one part of a story may trigger changes to the overall plot and vice versa. Taking inspiration from how expert authors write, we propose a technique for achieving interdependent complex goals with crowds. With this technique, the crowd loops between reflection, to select a high-level goal, and revision, to decompose that goal into low-level, actionable tasks. We embody this approach in Mechanical Novel, a system that crowdsources short fiction stories on Amazon Mechanical Turk. In a field experiment, Mechanical Novel resulted in higher-quality stories than an iterative crowdsourcing workflow. Our findings suggest that orienting crowd work around high-level goals may enable workers to coordinate their effort to accomplish complex work.