In this paper, we explore what a participatory design (PD) approach to artificial intelligence (AI) could look like coupling foundational PD work on empowerment and learning for local development with the concept of enacting utopias and its focus on cross-sectoral collaboration, expansive learning and transformative agency. We suggest that PD could offer a unique position in between utopias and dystopias of AI, focusing on empowering people and organizations to make informed decisions about AI to pose demands to the introduction of AI in work practices. To demonstrate this approach, we report from a case study where we hosted workshops in collaboration with a Union and 53 union members, to help them develop skills, knowledge and agency related to AI. Based on our case, we argue that PD could play a more prominent role in empowering people to take active part in shaping how AI is introduced into the workplace. The main contributions of this paper include a concrete workshop format based on PD principles to facilitate AI literacy and introducing of the concept of enacted utopias as a frame to guide PD efforts regarding AI.

Building on the first Tools for Thought (TfT) workshop at CHI 2025, we invite researchers, designers, and practitioners to further operationalise approaches for the design, usage, and evaluation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) as a TfT. The first goal of the workshop is to put into focus which outcomes a TfT should help people achieve to effectively augment their cognition while avoiding its erosion. Secondly, we will explore how to achieve these outcomes through design and usage strategies. Third, the workshop will also address what a TfT needs for its successful adoption and integration into people’s flow, so that they can benefit from the tools’ potential in their own terms. By focussing on these three research goals, the workshop aims to further develop and advance the multidisciplinary TfT community interested in exploring research frameworks, theories, methods, and approaches to conceptualising, designing, and researching GenAI as a TfT.

Given the current ecological crisis, the HCI and design community is showing a growing interest in the adoption of more-than-human perspectives, challenging human-centric approaches. While this has sparked numerous research initiatives, many of them are still a far cry from providing practical solutions or transforming the industry. This also presents a hurdle for teaching more-than-human perspectives to design students, as they may feel powerless to practice those teachings in real-life industrial settings. To bring forth concrete examples of how more-than-human design practice can matter, we believe that it is now time to move beyond theorising about and advocating for the adoption of such perspectives and start a more-than-human design practice that transforms the industry. This workshop therefore aims to bring together educators, researchers, and designers to discuss and co-develop strategies for transitioning more-than-human perspectives from niche/speculation to mainstream/practice in HCI and design. The workshop also aims to develop ways to empower students to work with these perspectives to bring about this transformation of the industry.

Prompts are central to creative work with generative AI systems, yet they are often treated as simple and static interface components. This paper proposes a different view: prompts function as cognitive interfaces that mediate between user intent and algorithmic generation. Integrating theories of external cognition, interface semiotics, and pragmatist theories of situated inquiry, the paper provides a theoretical framing of prompting along three interrelated dimensions: semantic projection, compositional structuring, and interpretive negotiation. Through an empirical vignette from branding communication, I show how prompting can be seen as a dynamic representational activity, deeply embedded in cognitive processes of exploration, articulation, and iterative refinement. By reframing the prompt as a site of cognitive labor rather than as a static interface, this expands our understanding of interaction with generative AI as epistemic, semiotic, and situated.

Generative AI tools are increasingly embedded in creative workflows, yet their outputs often misalign with user expectations, producing results that are ambiguous, contradictory, or oddly off-mark. Rather than treating such misalignments as failures to be corrected, this paper reframes them as sources of creative ambiguity and cognitive tension. Drawing on theories of cognitive dissonance, frame conflict, and prediction error, I show how these tensions can catalyze reflection, reinterpretation, and creative reframing. Through five cross-modal cases spanning writing, design, music, code, and prototyping I demonstrate how creative ambiguity and cognitive tension function as generative forces in human–AI interaction. This work contributes to HCI and creativity support by proposing a shift from optimization toward reflection, designing not to minimize friction, but to work with it.

We examine how micro-phenomenology, a qualitative research method developed to attend to, articulate, and analyse lived experience in fine detail, can be employed to study the experience of using digital systems. Micro-phenomenological interviews unpack the specific experiences of interviewees in fine-grained detail and have previously been acknowledged as a potent tool for Human-Computer Interaction Research. More recently, the method has been extended to comprise a structured analysis method to systematically analyse the temporal unfolding and qualitative dimensions of experiences captured by the interviews. This is the first paper demonstrating the combined use of interviews and analysis via a case in which they were employed to examine the experience of using WeUsedTo, a website for sharing experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic. On this basis, we discuss the potentials of the method for eliciting and understanding experiential aspects of interactive systems, particularly pertaining to embodiment, temporality, attention, agency, and the systemic nature of experience.

Ideas are crucial to design, and mastering various tools and methods to develop and manage creative ideas is paramount for a professional designer’s success. But how do design students learn this practice, and how important do they find tools to be across a design process? Little is known about this, in part due to a lack of systematic studies. We contribute an exploratory study of a group of undergraduate design students (n = 30) to examine the perceived importance of idea management activities across a five-day design sprint, including which tools were used and their experienced relevance for managing creative ideas. We found that participants: 1) perceived certain idea management activities as important; 2) considered idea management activities most important in the first part of the design sprint; 3) used a variety of analog and digital tools; and 4) perceived tools to be helpful for their creative design work, especially during the last two days of the design sprint.

This paper discusses how generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping creative labor through three interrelated transformations: the automation and platformization of creative tasks, the redistribution of economic value and authorship, and the redefinition of creative skills and competencies. Rather than framing GenAI as either a threat or a tool, the analysis foregrounds its role as a structural force that reorganizes workflows, market dynamics, and professional norms. The paper highlights how creative work is increasingly governed by digital infrastructures and algorithmic interfaces, raising urgent questions about recognition, attribution, and sustainability. These developments are analyzed within the broader context of how computing can simultaneously exacerbate and alleviate crises, arguing that GenAI exposes deep institutional and economic tensions in creative industries.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into popular digital tools for creative tasks. Many creative professionals also work collaboratively using these tools, and it is therefore important to investigate the effects of AI features on digitally mediated collaborative creativity. Utilizing a controlled experiment with 36 participants grouped in pairs, we assessed the effect of adding AI capabilities to a digital collaboration tool on the generation of creative ideas. The added AI features included support for divergent thinking, sense-making, and convergent thinking. Results, while statistically insignificant, indicate clear tendencies for trade-offs between appropriateness and novelty, such that pairs using AI support developed more novel, but less appropriate ideas. This preliminary study suggests that while AI can enhance the ideation process by expanding the possibility space, it may also lead to a decrease in the suitability of the generated ideas. These findings contribute to the understanding of AI’s role in creative collaborations and highlight the nuanced effects of AI tools in creative processes.

Creative practitioners rely on tools to capture and manage ideas as a foundational aspect of their work. However, we have little knowledge about how idea management practices vary in different creative domains. Combining insights from qualitative surveys (\(N\) \(\sim\)200) and follow-up in-depth interviews (\(n\) \(\sim\)60) with creative professionals from four domains (interaction design, research, music, and graphics) of creative work, we report on (1) how ideas are externalized in practitioners’ archives, (2) what they consider important when choosing tools to capture ideas, and (3) how these tool collections resemble and differ from each other. Our cross-domain study demonstrates that participants’ tool use reflects idea capture characteristic needs as well as domain-specific views about the creative process. We conclude with a discussion about capturing as an externalizing activity, practitioners’ use of the term ideas, and four suggestions for directions in the design of creativity support tools.

AI's transformative impact on work, education, and everyday life makes it as much a political artifact as a technological one. Current AI models are opaque, centralized, and overly generic. The algorithmic automation they provide threatens human agency and democratic values in both workplaces and daily life. To confront such challenges, we turn to Scandinavian Participatory Design (PD), which was devised in the 1970s to face a similar threat from mechanical automation. In the PD tradition, technology is seen not just as an artifact, but as a locus of democracy. Drawing from this tradition, we propose Participatory AI as a PD approach to human-centered AI that applies five PD principles to four design challenges for algorithmic automation. We use concrete case studies to illustrate how to treat AI models less as proprietary products and more as shared socio-technical systems that enhance rather than diminish human agency, human dignity, and human values.

We present a design space for displays in public libraries; more specifically public displays related to events taking place in the library. The design space is developed from the perspective of the librarians and is intended to support libraries in rethinking, developing, and employing displays to communicate and support the events they host. It is based on a study of 18 concepts co-designed in eight participatory workshops scaling participation to a total of 88 professional librarians. By analyzing the concepts through inductive and iterative analysis, we have defined a design space consisting of 12 aspects, categorized in four themes: interaction-, content-, event-, and display-centric. We argue that the design space can both serve as (1) an analytical tool for understanding and categorizing information displays and identifying overarching design considerations and (2) a generative framework to inspire design across a wide variety of libraries.

To understand and support creative work, we need to look at its manifestation in everyday professional practice. We do so by focusing on the core activity of capturing and managing material representations of ideas, i.e. idea management. Starting from previous empirical research in other domains, we devise a theoretical framework and extend it in the domain of Graphics. Combining a qualitative survey (n=48) and in-depth interviews (n=15), we look for unexpected themes that emerge only among graphic professionals. We expand the existing knowledge in four main ways: we identify what makes a graphic idea good compared to other domains, we observe that practitioners balance conflicting creative identities with consequences on their idea management needs, that graphic ideas are sculpted out of inspirational material, and that creative control is negotiated with clients and collaborators.

Creativity support tools (CSTs) are designed to support exploration, discovery, and innovation. However, we do not know to what extent the support for these activities correlate with the ease of use and ability to work rapidly, effectively, and with fewer errors. To examine the relationship between the concepts usability and creativity support, we present a preliminary study on what creative professionals (n=110) from various disciplines report to be the most important digital tools in their work (Word, Teams, Excel, Visual Studio Code, Photoshop). We deployed two well-established instruments, System Usability Scale and the Creativity Support Index. We found a clear positive correlation between the usability and creativity support, but it tended to vary depending on the type of digital tool. We discuss the potential causes of this correlation, and whether better usability in a tool might also result in better capabilities for supporting creative tasks.

Advances in artificial intelligence present a need for fostering AI literacy in workplaces. While there is a lack of research on how this can be achieved, there are documented successful approaches in child-computer interaction (CCI), albeit aimed at K-12 education. We present an in-vivo explorative case study of how CCI approaches can be adopted for adult professionals via a full-day workshop developed in collaboration with a trade union to upskill workers. Analyzing data from pre- and post-surveys, a follow-up survey, and materials produced by participants (n=53), we demonstrate how this increased participants’ knowledge of AI while their self-efficacy and empowerment did not improve. This is similar to findings from K-12 education, pointing to self-efficacy and empowerment as major challenges for AI literacy across sectors. We discuss the role of ambassadorships and professional organizations in addressing these issues, and indicate research directions for the CHI community.