Pioneering New Frontiers in Human-AI Creativity

BioSpark: Nature-Inspired Innovation

How can a woodpecker's skull help us design better helmets? The natural world is full of ingenious solutions to complex challenges, but they are often hidden in unrelated fields.

BioSpark is an AI-powered tool that helps inventors and engineers overcome this barrier by suggesting surprising analogies from biology, helping break "design fixation"—the tendency to get stuck on familiar but suboptimal solutions.

Publications

Beyond Analogical Inspiration to LLM-augmented Transfer Best Paper Honorable Mention

Hyeonsu B Kang, David Chuan-En Lin, Yan-Ying Chen, Matthew K Hong, Nikolas Martelaro, Aniket Kittur

ACM CHI 2025 Paper

Inkspire: Sketching with a Co-Creative AI

For a designer, the initial spark of an idea is just the beginning. The journey from a rough sketch to a refined concept involves countless iterations.

Inkspire is a creative partner that accelerates this exploration. A designer provides a simple sketch, and Inkspire generates a diverse range of visual ideas that build on the original concept, allowing for rapid prototyping while maintaining the designer's unique authorial voice.

Publications

Inkspire: Supporting Design Exploration with Generative AI through Analogical Sketching

David Chuan-En Lin, Hyeonsu B Kang, Nikolas Martelaro, Aniket Kittur, Yan-Ying Chen, Matthew K Hong

ACM CHI 2025 Paper Presentation

FlexMind: AI-Supported Flexible Ideation

Imagine having an ideation partner to support you through the chaotic yet exciting process of generating ideas!

FlexMind is one of our ongoing projects, designed to help people ideate with AI in a flexible, intuitive, and structured way. Learn more about FlexMind and explore how it can transform your creative process!

Our Core Principle

Human-Centered by Design

Our research is guided by a core principle: the human creator must remain in control.

These tools are designed to be trusted collaborators that provide inspiration and expand possibilities, while ensuring the user directs the creative process and maintains full ownership of the final outcome. We believe the future of creativity lies in this powerful synergy between human and machine.

Meet Our Team

Our interdisciplinary team brings together expertise in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and design research to push the boundaries of human-AI creativity.