Pei-Ying Lin

Pei-Ying Lin, Julie Heij, Iris Borst et al.

Amidst the emergence of powerful intelligent technologies such as LLMs and text-to-image AIs that promise to enhance creative processes, designers face the challenges of remaining empowered and creative while working with these foreign digital partners. While generative AIs offer versatile, informative, and occasionally poetic outcomes, their lack of embodied knowledge presents an even greater challenge to designers in gaining fruitful outcomes, such as in the field of Digital Craftsmanship. In this project, three designers embarked on a three-month experimental journey with an intention to co-create with Google's LLM as a potential intelligent partner to investigate how it will influence the designers' creativity. We found that a power dynamic of agencies exists between the LLM and the designer, in which the designer can easily lose their creative agency. Regaining the designer's creative agency involves introspection into their own creative process, a structural understanding of the specific emerging technology involved, and deliberate adjustments to the dynamics of the human-technology relationship. We propose paying attention to the designer's inner world and parties of agencies when engaging with emerging intelligent technologies through three aspects: the sensitivity towards a creative process as cognitive activities; the active investigation into specific technology's capability; and the adjustment towards an appropriate working relationship between the designer and the emerging technology.

Zhen-Chi Lai, Yu-Ting Cheng, Pei-Ying Lin et al.

As generative AI technologies rapidly advance, AI agents are gaining the ability not only to collect data and perform tasks but also to respond to environments and evolve over time. This shift opens new possibilities for reimagining digital legacy - raising critical questions about how we remember, commemorate, and interact with the traces of the deceased. The forms of these AI agents are particularly important, as they act as vessels for digital legacies - much like urns for ashes. We will ask: What kinds of devices or representations would we want to store our digital selves or legacies in? How do we envision future generations interacting with these forms? The question is not only about the function of these agents or the object's role as a storage vessel but also the meaning it carries, the memories it preserves, and its connection to the extended notion of our "Generative Horcrux." This three-hour in-person workshop invites design practitioners and researchers from diverse backgrounds to explore the emerging landscape of generative AI agent-based digital legacy. This workshop uses fiction and hands on prototyping to explore how AI agents might reconfigure memory, identity, and posthumous presence in future sociotechnical worlds. We anticipate that this session will foster interdisciplinary dialogue and contribute conceptually and methodologically to HCI, design research, and AI ethics.