English

From State Changes to Creative Decisions: Documenting and Interpreting Traces Across Creative Domains

Human-Computer Interaction 2026-03-10 v1 Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages

Abstract

Analyzing creative activity traces requires capturing activity at appropriate granularity and interpreting it in ways that reflect the structure of creative practice. However, existing approaches record state changes without preserving the intent or relationships that define higher-level creative moves. This decoupling manifests differently across domains: GenAI tools lose non-linear exploration structure, visualization authoring obscures representational intent, and programmatic environments flatten interaction boundaries. We present three complementary approaches: a node-based interface for stateful GenAI artifact management, a vocabulary of visual cues as higher-level creative moves in visualization authoring, and a programming model that embeds semantic histories directly into interaction state.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.07184,
  title  = {From State Changes to Creative Decisions: Documenting and Interpreting Traces Across Creative Domains},
  author = {Xiaohan Peng and Sotiris Piliouras and Carl Abou Saada Nujaim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.07184},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ACM CHI 2026 Workshop on Herding CATs: Making Sense of Creative Activity Traces

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:08:28.622Z