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!

Scaling Up Analogical Innovation

What if we could systematically generate breakthrough ideas? Analogy—connecting ideas from different fields—has been the secret weapon behind many of humanity's greatest innovations. But finding the right analogy at the right time is often left to chance.

We are pioneering a new approach that transforms analogical thinking from a solo effort into a scalable, global process. By combining the power of crowdsourcing with the speed of AI, we can overcome creative fixation, search vast idea repositories, and tackle complex design challenges.

We are building a future where this powerful synergy between humans and AI makes finding the next great idea a systematic and scalable process, open to everyone.

Publications

Scaling up analogical innovation with crowds and AI

Aniket Kittur, Lixiu Yu, Tom Hope, Joel Chan, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Karni Gilon, Felicia Ng, Robert E. Kraut, Dafna Shahaf

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Paper

This image shows our method in action. When asked to redesign a phone charger case (top), standard search methods suggested similar, uninspired products. In contrast, our analogy-powered approach (left) discovered diverse inspirations like a human-powered generator suit and a USB tower with a backup battery, leading to far more creative and novel ideas.

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.