C&C’s workshops span a spectrum from research-focused, to practitioner-focused, led by people working at the forefront of knowledge and practice. All aim to advance, extend, and share knowledge around creativity and cognition, explore new methods, techniques, and practices, and break new ground by fostering discussions, collaborations, and innovative experiences from different areas. Our venue this year—renowned for its development and retention of craft design skills and rich culture of creativity and design—also affords an especially rich opportunity to engage with both the history of creativity in craft, as well as existing and future practices. Research-focused workshops may request potential participants to submit position papers beforehand.
The following workshops have been announced. Most if not all are expected to take place on Monday 20th June.
W1: Venetian Drawing Conversations
Paulina Yurman, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, James Pierce, Nadia Campo Woytuk, Anuradha Reddy, Matt Malpass
Full-day Workshop
Website: https://drawing-conversations-2022.com
This research workshop invites designers, researchers and practitioners whose work might involve design, to collectively speculate about designed artefacts and technologies through the creation of drawing conversations: visual dialogues resulting from the merging of drawings created by different people. The workshop aims to use drawing as an activity for collaborative engagement with ambiguity, interpretation and mutual learning. Through drawing activities, we aim to join in Venice’s rich creative traditions, and develop speculative visualisations in order to find common grounds between the diverse research interests of our organisers and participants.

W2: Augmenting Personal Creativity with Artificial Intelligence
Angus Main, Mick Grierson, Dylan Yamada-Rice, Joshua Murr
Full-day Workshop
Website: http://www.augmentingcreativity.info/
This research workshop focuses on emerging approaches for using Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to support and augment personal creativity. Recent developments in generative Machine Learning demonstrate the ability of AI systems to perform tasks which are often associated with creativity – generating imagery, composing music, writing prose, etc. This workshop will examine opportunities for incorporating this kind of functionality into the creative practice of designers, artists and craftspeople, in practical and experimental ways. It will focus on how AI might enhance, rather than supplant, individual human creativity, through collaboration, serendipity, and creative reflection. We seek to engage a broad range of creative practitioners and researchers, bringing together those already using AI in their practice with those who are new to the technology, to understand emerging approaches and define future opportunities.

W4: Virtual and in-person co-design workshops: from alternative to complementary approaches
Simone Mora, Monica Divitini, Albrecht Kurze, Arne Berger, Martina Mazzarello, Dries De Roeck
Full-day Workshop
Website: https://virtual-physical-codesign.webflow.io
Co-design methods and toolkits are commonly used to involve people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines in design processes, promoting collaboration, design thinking, shared decision making, and creativity. These methods and toolkits are generally tailored to in-person workshops supported by different physical artifacts (e.g. card-sets) in a shared physical location. Physical co-location and artifacts allow participants to interact in seamless ways, relying on everyday modalities of interaction. The CoViD-19 pandemic has forced many of such workshops online. This required transforming location, methods, toolkits and to rethink interaction among participants. With this research workshop, we aim to look back at these experiences of transformation and to reflect on the affordances of the physical and the virtual in co-design workshops. What are the challenges of transforming location, methods, and toolkits that are designed for in-person workshops into the digital? In which ways can in-person and virtual workshops co-exist and complement each other? We invite participants to share their experiences and reflect on how to bring together virtual and in-person co-design workshops.
W5: Leading Teams To Victory: Where Creative Theory Meets Practice
Min Tang, Sebastian Hofreiter, Wendy Swart Grossman, Jeannette Guillemin
Half-day Workshop — Morning (AM)
Website: https://creativereframe.com/leading-teams-to-victory
This research-based, interactive workshop invites attendees to explore the sociocultural theory of creativity and to engage in interactive activities that spark team creativity and innovation. We will introduce the research of the VICTORY model (Vision, Ideation, Combination, Team, Openness, Risk-taking, and Yes-I-can Mindset) as a method to promote team creativity and innovation. Workshop participants— researchers, educators and creative practitioners— will have the opportunity to experience putting theory to practice. We will then bridge research with creativity training and introduce techniques to build powerful and effective multicultural, interdisciplinary teams.

W6: Designing Morphing Artifacts for Creative STEM Explorations
Harshika Jain, Melinda Chen, Alisha Collins, Lining Yao
Half-day Workshop — Afternoon (PM)
Website: https://www.morphingmatter.cs.cmu.edu/cc-workshop
Morphing Matter (MM) is a multidisciplinary field that combines material science and digital fabrication to create shape-changing and dynamic interfaces. In this workshop, participants will investigate ways in which MM tools can effectively support building STEM learning toolkits for novice learners from diverse backgrounds. Participants will engage in hands-on activities designing and simulating water-triggered morphing artifacts using a software tool called morphing beads and fabricating them with low-cost materials. The goal of this workshop is to collectively explore creative opportunities and barriers to introduce emerging STEM concepts and skills to novice learners. We hope to ideate frameworks for designing educational toolkits which leverage the accessible nature of morphing beads, democratizing a process which would typically require advanced material synthesis and specialized lab settings. Designers, educators, learning scientists and researchers are welcome to join us in brainstorming ways to develop toolkits to support creative exploration in education with MM.

W7: Here and there, now and then: Creativity, design and instruction for hybrid environments
Daragh Byrne, Dina EL-Zanfaly, Daphne Peters, Peter Scupelli, Daniel Rosenberg
Full-day Workshop
Website: https://workshop.embodiedcomputations.org/
Hybrid Environments—spaces where physical and digital elements are blended in-situ—have been growing and expanding over the past few decades. As these technologies become woven into our everyday lives, new challenges and opportunities emerge as they transform our experiences in our homes, workplace, museums, and cities. Designing hybrid environments requires training in both design of physical environments and interactive technologies. Cross-trained students in higher education need to be able to creatively respond and adapt to these emerging landscapes. Students must bridge fundamental knowledge in design, architecture, art, interactivity, and computation. This is a complex pedagogical practice. How are educators meeting this emergent need? The workshop’s primary goals are to (i) form a collective understanding of the current technology and pedagogical challenges to teaching the design and understanding of hybrid environments; (ii) bring together educators and practitioners interested in the future of hybrid environments, (iii) discuss creativity support tools as well as, frameworks, methods, and approaches for teaching emerging technologies, (iv) form a multidisciplinary community to shape the future of pedagogical inquiry and implementation to hybrid environments.

W8: Making AI: Advancing creative approaches to the design of AI systems through the craft of making them
Margaret McGrath, Nancy Salem, Laurel Boxall
Full-day Workshop
Website: https://aiyesterday.com/ACM-C-C-Workshop
The objective of this workshop is to rethink ‘making’ AI through a focus on the physical materials involved in designing, producing, and running artificially intelligent systems. The recent manufacturing chip shortage illuminates digital technologies’ physicality and the fragility of the commodity and production networks that underpin the AI systems our cities, governments, and workplaces have come to rely on. Those that are conventionally considered to ‘make’ AI through the design of AI systems are largely divorced from AI’s materiality and the craft of making AI. Corresponding research on AI and creativity focuses primarily on the digital artefacts, potentials and imaginaries AI creates, and less so on the social and material artefacts embedded in its ability to create. We hope to push participants beyond the theoretical knowing of AI materiality to tactile knowing through a practice-based approach to ‘making’ AI. Reorienting the focus of AI to materials and the supply chain as sites of creative intervention could leverage the potential of sensory, tactile experiences to spur re- imaginations of AI technologies and infrastructures. Ultimately, the aim is to advance creative approaches to the design of AI systems through the craft of making them.

W9: A Workshop on Brainstorming Workshops: Successful brainstorming with diverse creators in a hybrid work environment
Brooke White and Katie Quehl
Full-day Workshop
Website: https://aworkshoponbrainstormingworksh.godaddysites.com
Creating new products, services and research topics requires harnessing the best ideas from a broad set of cross- functional stakeholders who are creatively working together. Brainstorming workshops are powerful tools for developing design solutions or interventions, creating empathy, driving alignment, decision making and prioritization, and also for creating a deep understanding across a diverse group of creators. However, holding useful and energizing brainstorming workshops can be challenging given the variety of stakeholders and their ways of problem solving — made even more so with remote or hybrid work teams. This “Workshop on Brainstorming Workshops” is designed to highlight and model effective tools and best practices for practitioners to drive their own useful design thinking based brainstorming workshops in a fully remote or hybrid environment. We expect to share real world brainstorming techniques, trainings and templates from embedded researchers at Meta, sharing our insights and best practices, as well as facilitating a space for sharing of all participants’ insights around these challenges.

Registration for this year’s workshops and conference is now open.
For information on fees please click here