Research Workshop Analysis
Visual Storytelling Beyond the Human: Co-Creation, Culture, and Futures
Recent advances in generative AI have reshaped visual storytelling, transforming artificial intelligence from a passive tool into an active narrative agent. This workshop critically explores AI as a storyteller, collaborator, and provocateur, examining how AI reshapes visual narrative design practices, methodologies, and ethics.
Unlocking Narrative Potential with AI Co-Creation
The workshop aims to articulate new vocabularies, frameworks, and research pathways for Human-AI Narrative Interaction, bringing together diverse perspectives.
Deep Analysis & Enterprise Applications
Select a topic to dive deeper, then explore the specific findings from the research, rebuilt as interactive, enterprise-focused modules.
The workshop introduces a novel gap-and-fill methodology for human-AI co-creation in visual storytelling, as illustrated below. This approach combines human creativity with AI capabilities to explore new narrative possibilities.
Enterprise Process Flow
Our long-term commitment is to elevate visual storytelling within HCI. We aim to establish it as a legitimate and rigorous research methodology, moving beyond its traditional supplementary communication role.
Establishing Visual Storytelling as a Research Methodology
This workshop is committed to demonstrating that comics, storyboards, and sequential imagery can function as epistemic instruments capable of generating knowledge that textual formats cannot fully capture, particularly knowledge that is embodied, affective, temporal, and culturally situated. We aim to systematically inventory how visual storytelling currently manifests across HCI scholarship, cataloging existing visual-narrative genres, including design fiction, participant-created comics, and AI-collaborative visual essays.
The workshop invites researchers, practitioners, and artists to engage with three central provocations that challenge existing paradigms in HCI and visual storytelling:
| Provocation | Description |
|---|---|
| Silenced Knowledges | Whose stories are missing from dominant HCI narratives, and how can sequential art amplify them? |
| More-than-Human Worlds | How might visual storytelling attune us to the agencies of plants, animals, algorithms, or land? |
| Speculative Futures | What worlds can we drawing into being that textual papers cannot? |
Quantify Your AI Impact
Estimate the potential time savings and cost efficiencies your organization could achieve by integrating AI-powered visual storytelling tools.
Workshop Structure & Phases
The workshop is designed as a collaborative journey, moving from individual conceptualization to collective, AI-assisted narrative creation.
Individual Ideation (15 min)
Participants independently generate initial sketches and visual ideas related to their chosen theme, fostering individual perspectives.
Collaborative Composition (30 min)
Groups negotiate and combine individual sketches into a unified multi-panel narrative using low-fidelity tools to prioritize conceptual exploration.
AI-Human Co-Creation (15 min)
Groups integrate generative AI models to fill in blank panels, critically engaging questions of hybrid authorship and distributed agency.
Synthesis and Deck Preparation (20 min)
Each group prepares a presentation deck synthesizing their visual narrative and articulating key insights, challenges, and discoveries.
Group Presentations with Q&A (20 min)
Groups present their work in rapid succession, sharing creations and fostering concise articulation of core ideas within the full workshop community.
Ready to Reshape Your Narrative?
Join us in exploring the cutting edge of visual storytelling and human-AI co-creation. Let's imagine inclusive, pluralistic, and sustainable futures for HCI together.