Techno-positivist narratives of efficiency, productivity, and “democratised” creativity risk obscuring the material, situated realities of creative work; narrowing how HCI can imagine and enable alternative futures. This pictorial presents four futures workshops with seventy creative professionals that surfaced nuanced visions of creative practice with AI in 2030 through structured exploration of three temporal forces: the weight of history, the push of the present, and the pull of the future. We contribute to HCI and DIS by offering a visually-documented framework for futures workshops with creative communities, extending futures-oriented design methods with a structured, dialogic approach that makes ambivalent attitudes toward technology visible rather than reducing them to simple polarities. By translating these discussions into visual vignettes, created in collaboration with an illustrator, we show how pictorials can surface and compare nuances across cohorts, making the work accessible to researchers, educators, and the creative communities that this research is intended to support.
This is an excerpt from a conference proceedings (pictorial) in “ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS)” in Singapore, where I contributed as a research assistant and oral presenter on behalf of the team https://dl-acm-org.eux.idm.oclc.org/doi/10.1145/3800645.3812784
THE CHALLENGE SPACE
In the realm of creativity and the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), a dominant “technopositivist vision” has emerged that foregrounds themes of efficiency, productivity, and the democratisation of creativity [5]. Within these accounts, automation is celebrated as a means to minimise the time and effort involved in creative production, prioritising the concept or idea over material execution and long-term skills development. Simultaneously, the displacement of traditional craft skills is reframed as an opportunity to broaden access through reduced skill requirements, positioning GAI as a tool that liberates creativity from the material constraints of its realisation.
These narratives, predominantly shaped by technological stakeholders and the media rather than creative practitioners themselves, privilege efficiency over the material, embodied, and iterative dimensions of creative work. As Sanchez et al. note in their review of HCI’s future‑orientation [38], by reducing complex sociotechnical trajectories to linear progress driven by tools and platforms, such techno‑centric imaginaries risk constraining the field’s collective efforts to understand current conditions and, on that basis, explore potential possibilities and guide future‑oriented action (i.e., futuring).
This discourse is further polarised between utopian promises of augmented productivity and dystopian fears of creative obsolescence [7]. Public debate reinforces this split, swinging between the depiction of AI as a handy tool that speeds up routine tasks [44] and AI as a direct threat to human relevance, fuelling worries about job loss [24]. To some, AI proliferation appears inevitable [41], while other views express how its uptake depends on choices, contexts, and even resistance [15, 43]. And while the rapidly increasing capabilities to AI lead to considering it capable of “thinking” [39], others prefer to see it as a creative collaborator whose role is to support rather than substitute for, human intention [42].
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METHODOLOGY: WHY FUTURES?
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MAPPING A NUANCED SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE FUTURES
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DISCUSSION: NAVIGATING THE WILD WEST
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CONCLUSION
This pictorial demonstrates how adapting the Futures Triangle can move creative practitioners beyond the polarised “techno-positivist” versus “dystopian” narratives that dominate GAI discourse. Our workshops offered a framework for creative practitioners to articulate a breadth of positions on the adoption of GAI.
Rather than resolving disagreement, the method created conditions for more constructive dialogue about agency and adaptation. Through structured exploration of pulls, pushes, and weights, practitioners developed what we see as “critical consciousness” [14] about technological transformation—an awareness that connects everyday decisions to broader sociotechnical trajectories. The participant archetypes that emerged reflect how professional positioning, career stages, and value systems shape engagement with GAI, revealing patterns more nuanced than adoption or resistance.
A recurring outcome was the call for boundaries which surfaces a compelling visual metaphor: navigating GAI is comparable to the complex and challenging process of parenting. Just as child-rearing requires careful guidance, boundaries, and adaptive intervention, our participants emphasised the importance of approaching AI technologies with intentionality and critical oversight. Like parenting, there is no definitive manual for AI. Rather than universal prescriptions, both call for situated judgment rather than uncritically implementing blanket bans or a laissez‑faire uptake.
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FULL PAPER
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HOW TO CITE
Bagchi, P., Moruzzi, C., Bird, C., Chan, K., Dixon, B., Herman, L. M., Morrison, K., Wiradarmo, A. A., & Wang, Y. (2026, June). Mapping Imaginaries: A Futures Workshop for Creative Practices with Generative AI. In Proceedings of the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1623-1637).
REFERENCES
In the full paper
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