[Research]

I submitted my PhD thesis

On the first week of April, 2026, I submitted my PhD thesis titled “AI-powered Creativity Support Tools in Visual Design Work”, marking the end of a deeply transformative journey at the University of Melbourne and the beginning of an exciting new chapter. This research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and design practice, exploring how AI-powered tools can support and enhance the creative processes of visual designers. I approach this topic with a critical and unbiased lens; neither celebrating AI as a revolution nor dismissing it as a threat, but asking the harder, more honest questions: How do designers truly think, create, and innovate? And where does AI genuinely help, and where does it fall short?

[Research]

Our newest paper: Imagining Design Workflows in Agentic AI Futures

Published at OZCHI ‘25: 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Authors: Samangi Wadinambiarachchi, Jenny Waycott, Yvonne Rogers, Greg Wadley

As designers become familiar with generative AI, a new concept is emerging: agentic AI. While generative AI produces output in response to prompts, agentic AI systems promise to perform mundane tasks autonomously, potentially freeing designers to focus on what they love: being creative. But how do designers feel about integrating agentic AI systems into their workflows? Through design fiction, we investigated how designers want to interact with a collaborative agentic AI platform. Ten professional designers imagined and discussed collaborating with an AI agent to organise inspiration sources and ideate. Our findings highlight the roles AI agents can play in supporting designers, the division of authority between humans and AI, and how designers’ intent can be explained to AI agents beyond prompts. We synthesise our findings into a conceptual framework that identifies authority distribution among humans and AI agents and discuss directions for utilising AI agents in future design workflows.

[Research]

I attended Dagstuhl Seminar: Augmenting Human Creativity with AI

I attended the “Augmenting Human Creativity with AI” seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, a renowned location for computer scientists to discuss emerging research topics. Being surrounded by many HCI experts working on creativity and design was so wonderful. To be a part of all illuminating discussions around AI in creativity and design, the current state of the art, challenges, and the way forward was indeed inspiring.

[Research]

Designers! Want to test new AI tools?

Interested? Register Now!

To sign up for the study, and submit your expression of interest click on the following link. https://tinyurl.com/Study4EOI

[Research]

The effects of Generative AI on Design Fixation and Divergent Thinking

Authors: Samangi Wadinambiarachchi, Ryan M. Kelly, Saumya Pareek, Qiushi Zhou, Eduardo Velloso

Generative AI systems have been heralded as tools for augmenting human creativity and inspiring divergent thinking, though with little empirical evidence for these claims. This paper explores the effects of exposure to AI-generated images on measures of design fixation and divergent thinking in a visual ideation task. Through a between-participants experiment (N=60), we found that support from an AI image generator during ideation leads to higher fixation on an initial example. Participants who used AI produced fewer ideas, with less variety and lower originality compared to a baseline. Our qualitative analysis suggests that the effectiveness of co-ideation with AI rests on participants’ chosen approach to prompt creation and on the strategies used by participants to generate ideas in response to the AI’s suggestions. We discuss opportunities for designing generative AI systems for ideation support and incorporating these AI tools into ideation workflows.