Reflections on C&C
Conference 2024,
Ideas for C&C 2025

Begin with the end in mind

The C&C 24 conference materials had prominent themes throughout the material. The working theme of the conference, “Organic Creative Spaces,” and its linking to Frank Lloyd Wright, on its surface, leaves something to be desired. But conceptually, if you think a little deeper, it reminds me of aspects of my nomadic life spent searching for creativity and co-creators. Technology has allowed me to face creativity alone and with collaborators, and technology is rapidly changing in the present and leading up to 2024. Artificial Intelligence figures prominently into many themes throughout the 2024 conference, and AI could soon become any person's collaborator and co-creator if they are willing, if they can harness the potential, and if they choose to accept it.

When discussing technology or any other subject, as academics, we always discuss inclusivity. That is the field we are in; that is what we do in academia; it's a prerequisite. In the present, which is not even the near future, people will need to consider including AI in every activity they do to harness their advantages. All people need to have access to technology, be included in its use, and be willing and able to understand and accept the potential benefits these technologies can provide them. It's a double-edged sword; people need access, but they also need to accept this technology to be a part of it and for it to be a part of them. The inclusivity flows both ways; people will need to accept and understand AI or be left behind.

But to return to “Organic Creative Spaces,” one thing I learned back in the mid-1990s throwing raves is that every space is an organic creative space. You don't need to be surrounded by the beautiful symmetric efficiency of Frank Lloyd Wright to be in that space. Everywhere you go and set up gear, open your laptop, or even just look at your smartphone, you have the potential to create something unique. The difference is that now you don't need to bring a collaborator because you always have one. The concept of spaces is metaphorical here because a space is not just physical; it's an environment of co-creation, and inclusivity now extends down to the individual. AI will allow us to co-create with ourselves, which is an interesting thing to think about. So, this co-creation space is not just an exhibition hall, a conference center, a café, a message board, a university, or an educational system; it's now within us. Artificial intelligence is the moderator that allows us to create more effectively with ourselves. If you can create with yourself, then you can create with others.

My interest in artificial intelligence is to create technologies that harness it and its potential in ways that humans can benefit from it. So, I need to continue to develop a deep understanding of what it is and how to create and implement tools that utilize it. From examining the C & C 2024 conference, I can ascertain that this community is perfect for me; the work is both inventive and practical, theoretical and applied, creative and functional. I want to do this in my research: make things that work. This is why I have an interest in design thinking. This discipline allows me to synthesize data and create things that work. That's my goal. I want to leave artifacts in the world for which I can be remembered. Records. Papers. Books. Programs. Tools.

Themes of C&C 2024

• AI as co-creator and creative collaborator
• Inclusivity and accessibility in technology
• Knowledge management and idea generation
• Immersive and multi-sensory environments
• Sustainability and organic systems
• Human-AI interaction and ethical frameworks
• Social and economic repercussions of AI
• Tools for creativity support
• Cultural heritage and preservation
• Embodied cognition and learning
• Multimodal technology

Thoughts on papers

“Mixed-Initiative Methods for Co-Creation in Scientific Research,” I am immediately drawn to this paper because it uses design principles as a foundation. Applying the double diamond model to the concept is a concrete example of how the principles of the UX program can be applied to the academic study of AI and the practical development of tools that serve a purpose. Additionally, there is a focus on research inspiration and idea generation, which is foundational to the work that I aspire to do. I will create solutions to creative blocks and inspirational deficiencies, and to me, the area of focus of these tools is less important than the effectiveness of the tools themselves. That is not to say that this area is not essential to me; helping researchers be more creative is a net positive for everyone, myself included.

This is why I thought that user experience was necessary. The user is what defines these tools. As an emerging technology, what people do with artificial intelligence and how they do it is integral to its development. Designers, developers, and companies may define how it works and how it is presented. Still, users, such as Marissa Radensky, ultimately decide what it does by determining how they wish to apply it to whatever they are doing. It's essential to look at the scope of Radensky's project through the lens of design: she defines a problem, conducts research, iterates, and comes up with a working solution.

I came to the User Experience program at Kent State University because I wanted to create things. I chose User Experience to develop tools for people, not revenue for corporations and not points for markets. I want to design tools that people want to use that make those people more efficient and creative, and if this happens, then the revenue problem will solve itself. My desire to further my education beyond the UX MS program is an extension of that: I want to develop new technologies. That is why I want to do research. I want to create new things, ideas, trends, and technology. I'm a hands-on person. If I can spend over 10,000 hours making music, I can spend 20,000 hours making technology that improves the world. If technology extends my life span, I can spend more time doing it than I would otherwise.

My interests beyond user experience are artificial intelligence and how to harness its potential, music technology, language, freedom of information, expression, and knowledge management. I wish to push the potential of technology and humanity as far as possible. I think Kent State is a good place to do that; our commitment to artistic expression, the pedigree of our journalism school, and our Design Innovation Hub factor into my decision.

These papers address many complex topics, and the scope of this conference is inspiring. In “The Impact of Generative AI on Artists,” Kawakami and Venkatagiri explore how artists feel about the rise of artificial intelligence and its impact on them. My life has shown me that in the United States, people generally define their lives with their net worth. In my experience, what people have and their level of security are more important than their purpose or curiosity.

The findings in this study don't feel adequately grounded or explored. I have seen a generalized lack of understanding of what AI is: a system of information analysis. An AI has a hard time creating a painting that people care about; for the same reason, it creates terrible copy and can't truly understand the subtleties of human interaction: it's not human. It approximates the tasks given to generate a result that humans think is acceptable. It will continue to improve at what it is doing but will never be a human. It's a tool, and it should be treated as such. If you are an artist who can't create something better than the results of a computer, then you aren't executing the task correctly.

I have philosophical objections to the idea that AI should or should not be trained on particular things. I come from an era where popular culture was almost entirely defined by a musical technique known as sampling. I sample. I've sampled other material for nearly three decades, and ANYTHING is fair game to me. I don't have any respect for the idea of intellectual property beyond not claiming something to be yours which isn't. I remember sitting in a lecture at the Andy Warhol Museum with DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, and he called it Sampling Reality, and it is almost a duty of people to “flip” these things in our reality in a way that enlightens other humans. None of us asked to be subjected to the noise, the ads, the movies, the songs, and all these things in our reality that other people claim ownership of. I find it my duty to deface these things, like Banksy. I can look at “Should an AI be allowed to collect my data?” and honestly say yes because that data exists. You synthesized it and presented it to the world; it's done.

On a less philosophical note, I want to do more thematic analysis. I was presented with the technique last semester, and I enjoyed it and its results. An aspect of this study that troubles me is that it was parsed from social media. The ideas people express on social media or in things they publish are not truly their own; they are created for an audience. When a person or organization publishes something, they always do it for a reason. So, this study could have been conducted much more by interviewing the people who made the statements that formed it. These are the aspects of art, research, and language that AIs cannot understand because an LLM doesn't do interviews. It looks at interviews and tries to make a report about them for whoever is administering it, like how humans make statements for a purpose. The trend that people could be avoiding the field of art together is a true tragedy; unfortunately, I do not think the idea of copyright and consent is a valid defense. Observing and approximating something isn't the same as copying or stealing it. This is more than a matter of semantics. I believe that human artists are generally better at making art than artificial intelligence, but the relevance of this is determined not by the artist but by the audience. If the audience can't tell the difference, then what is the point?

Other papers of note that utilized thematic analysis: “Evolving Roles, Workflows and Design Opportunities: A Study of Creative Practitioners Interacting with and Orchestrating Generative AI,” was interesting because the ideas of creativity support tools relate to my overall reason for doing what I am doing: helping people to be more creative. The diversity of the practitioners' methods and use of AI is of particular interest to me. I particularly like how it applies to design. “Using Incongruous Genres to Explore Music Making with AI-Generated Content” is interesting from a tactical perspective. I am less interested in the music AI creates (even though it is probably fun to sample) than how it creates it and how AI interprets music, so this paper appealed to me in that regard.

Many of the papers presented appeal to my practical side: creating specific solutions to specific problems is essential. I appreciate the practicality of the nature of the works selected for the 2024 conference. In research, it is imperative to measure effectiveness, but in creation, it is essential to be EFFECTIVE. Starting with the above-mentioned “Mixed-Initiative Methods for Co-Creation in Scientific Research” paper and moving forward, many of these papers present applicable problem-solving solutions, the types of solutions I would like to help create. “Experiential Tutorials: Designing Tutorial Authoring Tools to Facilitate Tacit Knowledge Exchange in Creative Practices” by Shreyosi Endow, “A Toolkit for Crafting Simple Sonic Interfaces in Education” by Christopher Bannon, “Cyber Ear / Cypher Ear, a System for Automatically Appreciating Off-the-Top Rap” by Daniel Villagran, Nick Montfort, Wasalu Jaco and “Evaluation of Concept Erasing for Signature Artistic Styles in Diffusion Models” by Matyas Bohacek, amongst many of these papers, demonstrate the practicality that I see necessary in research that I would do: these researchers are creating practical solutions to things. One of these stood out as particularly relevant to work I had done previously: “Speculative Morphing Matter: Designing a Sustainable Future via Innovations on Morphing Materials and Structures” by Qimo Wan reminded me of the soil remediation part of a water quality management contract I helped execute in Idaho and Washington on Snake, Clearwater, and Columbia rivers, and I would like to revisit this through the lens of that experience. The specificity and practicality of many of the studies in this conference directly appeal to my problem-solving nature.

I came to Kent State to learn interaction design. To understand that, I took four classes, including Introduction to Interaction Design. I am approaching the study of user experience from the generalist path because I realize that the levels of interaction design that I wish to understand are beyond the university's resources. This is fine; given the proper resources, I can teach myself and eventually teach others. That being considered, I appreciated the practicality of many of these papers that explored multimodality in interaction design. “Trace to Touch: Eliciting Gestures from Capacitive Touch Electrodes,” “Exploring the Potential for Generative AI-based Conversational Cues for Real-Time Collaborative Ideation,” and “touchBase: A Tangible Programming Language for Physical Computing” are all quick examples of practical approaches to expanding the field of interaction design both academically and practically, and represent the types of effort that I would like to contribute to as an aspiring designer and researcher.

There is so much more just in the 58 papers I could touch on from the 2024 conference, so much so that I can't fit it all into this report. The information was overwhelming. I like that the ACM Creativity & Cognition community focuses on a mixture of creative, practical, artistic, and academic. I like the fact that not everything is completely serious. While reviewing this conference, I researched many of the authors of these studies and their other endeavors, and I applied to volunteer for the conference.

Ways that I could contribute to the Creativity and Cognition community

1. My synthesizer application harvests data from the sensor built into an iPad and influences the sound, re-influencing the environment.
2. I am interested in how environments influence creativity and productivity.
3. I am interested in how people practice and cultivate creativity and desire to create tools that foster individual creative growth.
4. I am interested in how people discover and process information and how information is channeled to them.
5. I am drawn to complex interaction design across various modalities that advance efficiency and creativity.
6. I am interested in how AI works, categorizes information, and applies that information meaningfully.
7. I want to create tools and technologies that are practical, useful, and accessible.
8. I want to build systems that help to preserve knowledge and culture, not erase it.

As I continue my graduate studies and professional endeavors, I hope to apply what I've learned from the C&C 2024 conference to help develop creative technologies that matter, tools that solve problems, and expand the boundaries of what people believe they can do.

Appendix

This is a list of papers I was able to touch on. Some of them I read completely, some of them I only read Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion.

1. Mixed-Initiative Methods for Co-Creation in Scientific Research
2. Every Body Dance Now: What Dancers with Disabilities Can Teach HCI
3. Creative Explainable AI Tools to Understand Algorithmic Decision-Making
4. Overcoming challenges to personal narrative co-writing with AI: A participatory design approach for under-resourced high school students and those that support them
5. Understanding and Supporting Code Performances
6. Embodied Cognition, Body Coherence, and Immersion in Non-Euclidean Virtual Reality
7. Experiential Tutorials: Designing Tutorial Authoring Tools to Facilitate Tacit Knowledge Exchange in Creative Practices
8. A Toolkit for Crafting Simple Sonic Interfaces in Education
9. Cyber Ear / Cypher Ear, a System for Automatically Appreciating Off-the-Top Rap
10. Interactive Modules Using Parametric Design
11. Evaluation of Concept Erasing for Signature Artistic Styles in Diffusion Models
12. Speculative Morphing Matter: Designing a Sustainable Future via Innovations on Morphing Materials and Structures
13. Trace to Touch: Eliciting Gestures from Capacitive Touch Electrodes
14. The Impact of Generative AI on Artists
15. (W)E-waste: Creative Making with Rescued Computing Devices
16. Explainable AI for the Arts 2 (XAIxArts2)
17. Dreamscaping: Supporting Creativity By Drawing Inspiration from Dreams
18. Building Creative Confidence through Human-Centered Design
19. In Dialogue
20. Perceptions of Interaction Dynamics in Co-Creative AI: A Comparative Study of Interaction Modalities in Drawcto
21. Exploring the Potential for Generative AI-based Conversational Cues for Real-Time Collaborative Ideation
22. Creativity Support in the Age of Large Language Models: An Empirical Study Involving Professional Writers
23. MIMOSA: Human-AI Co-Creation of Computational Spatial Audio Effects on Videos
24. Evolving Roles, Workflows and Design Opportunities: A Study of Creative Practitioners Interacting with and Orchestrating Generative AI
25. Centering Bodies in Space and Place through Virtual Reality Dance Performance: A Practice-Based Research Perspective
26. Body and Code: A Distributed Cognition Exploration Into Dance and Computing Learning
27. A Review of Visual Strategies in Pictorials
28. Using Incongruous Genres to Explore Music Making with AI Generated Content
29. Ai.llude: Encouraging Rewriting AI-Generated Text to Support Creative Expression
30. Sampling the Glitch Spectrum: Exploring the Architecture of Digital Media
31. Creativity and Ethnography: An Expansive Proposal for 'in the Wild' Research of Ideas in Practice in Design Studios
32. Idea-Centric Search: Four Patterns of Information Seeking During Creative Ideation
33. When to Give Feedback: Exploring Tradeoffs in the Timing of Design Feedback
34. VideoMap: Supporting Video Editing Exploration, Brainstorming, and Prototyping in the Latent Space
35. Videogenic: Identifying Highlight Moments in Videos with Professional Photographs as a Prior
36. How Example-Based Authoring of Motion Graphics Impacts Creative Expression: Differences in Perceptions of Professional and Casual Motion Designers
37. Get Your Hands Dirty? A Comparative Study of Tool Usage and Perceptual Engagement in Physical and Digital Sculpting
38. Improving Selection of Analogical Inspirations through Chunking and Recombination
39. Reflection Across AI-based Music Composition
40. Homogenization Effects of Large Language Models on Human Creative Ideation
41. SHARP: Exploring Version Control Systems in Live Coding Music
42. The Secret Life of Data: Uncovering the Diverse, Lived, and More-Than-Human Nature of Personal Data
43. “My ideas come little by little”: how graphic professionals manage ideas
44. touchBase: A Tangible Programming Language for Physical Computing
45. Knowledge Net: Fostering Children's Understanding of Knowledge Representations Through Creative Making and Embodied Interaction in a Museum Exhibit
46. Fostering AI Literacy with LuminAI through Embodiment and Creativity in Informal Learning Spaces
47. Creative Insights into Motion: Enhancing Human Activity Understanding with 3D Data Visualization and Annotation
48. From Digital Practices to Bond Formation: A Mixed-Method Case Study of BTS Online Fandom Communities
49. Cognitive Operations and Patterns in Remote Design Collaboration: A Protocol Study
50. MS Slide Designer: A Study on Human-AI Collaboration for Content Creation
51. CoCo Matrix: Taxonomy of Cognitive Contributions in Co-writing with Intelligent Agents
52. Communicating Design Intent Using Drawing and Text
53. AI-Yo: Embedding Psychosocial Aspects In the Fashion Stylist Chatbot Design
54. Reconstructing Identity: An Augmented Reality Exploring Self-Objectification
55. The Digital Blossoming: Generative Flowers of Ethnic Wisdom
56. Designing AI with Metaphors: Leveraging Ambiguity and Defamiliarization to Support Design Creativity
57. How do video content creation goals impact which concepts people prioritize when generating B-roll imagery?
58. DataBites: An embodied, co-creative museum exhibit to foster children's understanding of supervised machine learning