Modeling Sequential Design Actions as Designer Externalization on an Infinite Canvas
This addresses the problem of understanding AI's impact on designers' externalization processes for designing phase-adaptive tools, though it is incremental as it builds on existing research on human-AI interaction.
The study investigated how AI organizing agents affect designers' workflows on infinite canvas platforms, finding that AI integration shifts cognitive effort from spatial management to content curation and relational structuring without increasing active time, and identifies a generate-and-curate cycle with evolving AI roles.
Infinite canvas platforms are becoming central to contemporary design practice, enabling designers to externalize cognition through the spatial arrangement of multimodal artifacts. As AI agents increasingly generate and organize content within these environments, their impact on designers' externalization processes remains underexplored. We report a field study with eight professional designers comparing workflows with and without an AI organizing agent. Through a sequence analysis of 5,838 design actions, we identify three key shifts: (1) AI integration reallocates cognitive effort from spatial management to content curation and relational structuring, without increasing active time; (2) a characteristic generate-and-curate cycle emerges in which designers' demands on the agent intensify while the agent's functional role adapts; and (3) AI's role evolves from a divergent catalyst in early stages to a convergent curator in later phases. These findings offer a behavioral model for designing phase-adaptive AI tools that support human-AI co-evolution on infinite canvases.