Human creativity has been often aided and supported by artificial tools, spanning traditional tools such as ideation cards, pens, and paper, to computed and software. Tools for creativity are increasingly using artificial intelligence to not only support the creative process, but also to act upon the creation with a higher level of agency. This paper focuses on writing fiction as a creative activity and explores human-AI co-writing through a research product, which employs a natural language processing model, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), to assist the co-authoring of narrative fiction. We report on two progressive – not comparative – autoethnographic studies to attain our own creative practices in light of our engagement with the research product: (1) a co-writing activity initiated by basic textual prompts using basic elements of narrative and (2) a co-writing activity initiated by more advanced textual prompts using elements of narrative, including dialects and metaphors undertaken by one of the authors of this paper who has doctoral training in literature. In both studies, we quickly came up against the limitations of the system; then, we repositioned our goals and practices to maximize our chances of success. As a result, we discovered not only limitations but also hidden capabilities, which not only altered our creative practices and outcomes, but which began to change the ways we were relating to the AI as collaborator.

Reflection is a recurring notion in the HCI/interaction design literature. Throughout the years “reflection” has been highlighted as a key dimension of design thinking and as an important ingredient of design processes. In this paper we take stock in our community's interest in reflection, and we suggest that while it has been acknowledged as a cornerstone for design processes, it has been less explored as a basis for design outcomes. Given this extensive literature study, it seems that 1) the interest in this area is growing, and we present tables that illustrate this growing interest over time; 2) reflection and behavioral change are two interrelated notions; and 3) these notions are well-explored in our field. Further, we suggest that as interaction design is increasingly exploring the design of “tangible,” “smart,” “connected,” and even “intelligent” artifacts, we should think about how reflection and our ability to “think with artifacts” can be extended to include the design of interactive artifacts. In this paper we suggest how that might be done, and we point at a design space for designing such interactive artifacts to think with.

In design theory, we often come across scholarly efforts that seek to define design as a unique discipline and to characterize it as a distinct category of practice, with its own epistemology in that it differs from sciences, arts and humanities (Cross, N. 2011. Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work. Oxford: Berg.; Dorst, K. 2015. Frame innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Nelson, H. G., and E. Stolterman. 2012. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. The MIT Press.; Redström, J. 2017. Making Design Theory. MIT Press.). Although such efforts are helpful in teasing forward the nature of design epistemologies and practices, we question them by critically engaging with epistemic paradigms informing design education, its structural forms, origins and purposes, historically, while suggesting the time has come to reevaluate design’s relationships with other epistemological traditions, including the sciences and humanities. We unpack history of design education, in order to problematize what we have come to view as overly schematized epistemological distinctions, most notably the asserted opposition between (what Schön calls) technical rationality and an alternative epistemology broadly linked to pragmatism and/or phenomenology. We do so by offering a genealogy of design education showing that since the nineteenth century, design programmes have continuously, if diversely, taught novice designers, methods, crafts, and attitudes that reflect diverse epistemological traditions. Theorists and educators of design have a shared interest in balancing the needs to appreciate and help develop that which is distinctive of design and also to build upon design’s rich epistemological connections to the sciences and humanities. Whereas the former helps the field improve its abilities to contribute to society, the latter provides many of the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical resources that make such contributions possible.