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Published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies

Authors: Samangi Wadinambiarachchi, Jenny Waycott, Greg Wadley

Emerging generative AI (GenAI) tools, which are known to encompass cultural biases, are anticipated to significantly impact creative work, especially as they become incorporated into professional software suites such as Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, Figma, and Miro. Professionals and pundits predict positive and negative outcomes, ranging from substantial productivity gains to the risk of reduced employment opportunities for creative practitioners, concerns around intellectual property, and fears that a lack of diversity in training data will result in diminished variety of creative outputs. This uncertainty makes it vital to examine how generative AI is used and perceived at the cutting edge of adoption across professional contexts in both the Global North and South. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 professional User Experience (UX), User Interface (UI) and graphic designers from across cultural contexts, with most from Global South backgrounds. Participants were at varying stages of GenAI adoption; some were exploring and others were integrating GenAI tools into their professional workflows. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we analysed participants’ experiences to understand how socio-economic and cultural situatedness shaped their engagement with GenAI tools. Our findings revealed a complex, asymmetric landscape of AI adoption within professional design workflows. We contribute insights into asymmetries within extended creative cognition, uncovering a paradox of access wherein AI provides essential scaffolding for participants’ work while simultaneously imposing a standardisation tax that constrains situated cultural expression. We propose design directions for GenAI tools that may promote cultural inclusivity and ethically responsible Human-AI collaboration.

Marking the moment of my PhD submission, this song is my way of putting into words what the journey felt like — the solitude, the doubt, and the quiet determination to keep going. I couldn’t wait for a proper production, so, I recorded this rough guide at home: just me, my guitar, and a few basic chords on the same setup I used to write my thesis.

Published at OZCHI ‘25: 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Authors: Samangi Wadinambiarachchi, Jenny Waycott, Yvonne Rogers, Greg Wadley

As designers become familiar with generative AI, a new concept is emerging: agentic AI. While generative AI produces output in response to prompts, agentic AI systems promise to perform mundane tasks autonomously, potentially freeing designers to focus on what they love: being creative. But how do designers feel about integrating agentic AI systems into their workflows? Through design fiction, we investigated how designers want to interact with a collaborative agentic AI platform. Ten professional designers imagined and discussed collaborating with an AI agent to organise inspiration sources and ideate. Our findings highlight the roles AI agents can play in supporting designers, the division of authority between humans and AI, and how designers’ intent can be explained to AI agents beyond prompts. We synthesise our findings into a conceptual framework that identifies authority distribution among humans and AI agents and discuss directions for utilising AI agents in future design workflows.

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